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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/no-writing-left-behind).

**John August:** Hey this is John. So, Craig and I are going to be at the Austin Film Festival this weekend. We look forward to seeing many of you there. But there’s two other things that I’m going to be at that I wanted to let you guys know.

So this Saturday I will also be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. I’m on a panel at 10:30am Saturday morning called Fantasy Meets Reality with two other great authors, so you can come see me. That’s free. And there’s a signing afterwards at 11:30. There’s a link in the show notes for that. And on Monday I will be in Boulder, Colorado, my hometown, at the Boulder Bookstore. There’s a book event at 6:30pm. I’ll be reading and signing books, so if you’re in the Boulder or Denver area come see me there. So, links to both of these are in the show notes. And now on with the normal Scriptnotes.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing the kind of writing you do before you start writing, such as pitches and outlines, and why it’s a bad idea to give that material to producers and executives. We’ll also be answering a listener question about want versus need.

**Craig:** You know what? This is going to be a good episode in part because I broke this rule recently and I feel bad about it. And it was a certain circumstance but I still feel bad about it, so part of this episode is going to be me cleansing myself through fire.

**John:** Yeah. So, we’re going to dive right in on leave behinds, but I’ve had my own experiences where I’ve left stuff behind and felt kind of guilty about it and recognized it was a bad thing. Like this is a bad idea, but we’ll get into sort of why it’s a bad idea and sort of everything.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** No follow up. No news. We’re going to get right into it.

**Craig:** Just plow in. Boom.

**John:** So this most recent version of this topic came because last fall we did a bunch of screenwriter outreach lunches. So the WGA would invite screenwriters in and we’d talk about what things were concerning to them. And so you went to one of those lunches and I went to a bunch of those lunches and there was one lunch – I think not the one that you were at – where this writing team was there and they described how they had to write a 50-page treatment to get this job.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** I wanted to reach through time and grab them by their lapels and say don’t do that. But of course they didn’t know they were doing that at the start. They went in and they pitched on a project, they had their little notes with them. The producer or the executive said like, “Oh hey, could you send through that stuff?” And so they sent through that stuff and then he’s like, “Oh, could you just work on it a little bit more?” And it escalated up until it became a 50-page document for which they were not paid before they were hired to write that script.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve been hearing this a lot. And, you know, we just both spoke about how we have occasionally done things like this, but I’ve never done it because I’ve been asked to do it. I’ve only done it because I wanted to. Sometimes I have – and I need to stop for reasons that we’ll get to later – but sometimes I think to myself well you know it would be easier if I just sort of wrote down across two pages what it is exactly I’m feeling here, this way I don’t have to feel quite so song-and-dancey when I sit down with people.

But what you’re describing there and what those writers described that’s happening all the time now and it is just a pure abuse. It is not just kind of a narrow abuse of writers per the MBA and the WGA and blah-blah-blah. It is all of that. It’s an actual abuse of humans to make them do things like this. It’s outrageous. And it is reflective of I think the cheapest, thinnest, meanest kind of executive, the most frightened sort of employer who is incapable of just making a decision or acknowledging for instance that they just don’t have as much control over this process as they wish they did. And so they make writers do this awful, awful thing that degrades them. So by the time the writer is hired the power dynamic has already been blown to smithereens.

**John:** Yep. So we’re going to talk about how this pertains to screenwriters and to some degree TV writers, but I think a lot of people listening to this program who are not writers are nodding along because any kind of freelance worker – anybody who is working for him or herself may find themselves in the situation where in order to get the job they’re asking you to do a lot of stuff first. And auditions are great, but when you’re auditioning and you’re just creating new material that is a real problem and you’re under-validating your work and you’re making it harder for everyone around you.

So we can get into this. One of the nice things, we do have a union. And one of the things a union can do is actually conduct surveys to figure out how pervasive a thing is. We’re able to survey our membership. And amongst screenwriters at least a third reported they were asked to turn in written material before getting a job and that number is up to 41% when you look at screenwriters who are earning around scale, so at the lower tier of it, which tells you that the newer writers are more likely to be asked to do this stuff than you or me.

**Craig:** That’s the statistic that makes me want to vomit the hardest. I mean, everything that we’re going to talk about today is vomit worthy. But that one really gets me because those are the people who should be asked the least of. They’re getting paid around scale. That means the minimum amount we can pay them. That’s the minimum wage of the Writers Guild. And you may look and say, well, you know, scale is actually pretty good. That’s a pretty good number. Yeah, except spread that out over a year and a half, take away taxes, and if you’re writing with a partner cut it in half. Oh, and then give away what is routinely 25% to an agent, a manager, and a lawyer. It’s not a lot.

And those people, the ones who can afford this misery the least, nearly half of them are being asked to work without any pay at all.

**John:** Yep. Craig it’s actually much, much worse than you’re describing.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Because think about this. We’re surveying all these screenwriters and we’re saying, OK, you’re earning at about scale level. But who knows how many jobs they’re going in for and being asked to submit material that they weren’t being paid for? So for all we know this theoretical screenwriter/screenwriting team went in on five different jobs and were asked to provide written material on all five jobs. And so that’s the real frustration here is that this is pervasive and it shouldn’t be happening.

So, starting today we just rolled out a new campaign through the WGA called No Writing Left Behind, which is just to remind writers they shouldn’t be doing this. In fact, they can’t be doing this. It’s considered free work. And we just need to stop doing it. So, you and I are talking about it, but we’re going to have a bunch of other screenwriters talking about it today and tomorrow and this week with stickers and articles and everything out there just to let everyone know that this is a thing that shouldn’t be happening.

And also why it shouldn’t be happening on the studio level, the producer level, because it is a giant copyright liability for them as well.

**Craig:** This was an argument that I made to a number of people at studios. I made it at Paramount. I made it at Universal. And I have always describe this as a ticking time bomb. And I think it’s actually gone off a few times in all honesty. I think a few times they have been called on their shenanigans because what happens is they ask writers to supply them with writing before they can get a job. Well, as you point out, only one writer or team can get the job. So what happens to all that other writing that they’ve collected from people they haven’t employed? They don’t own that writing now. Can other writers do anything with that writing? No. But can the studio? No. They haven’t purchased it.

And so they go ahead and make a movie and then someone calls up and says, “You know that scene? I wrote that. You took it from me and you don’t own it.” And now they’ve got a problem. And I think if the business affairs people at studios understood how widely practiced this chicanery is they would lose their minds because it is incredibly dangerous for them. It’s a huge liability.

**John:** And so in today’s conversation we’re going to focus on screenwriters, people who are writing feature movies, partly because that’s what you and I know, partly because that’s who we have the data on. But it’s also the nature of the kind of jobs we’re going in for. It’s more likely to happen to feature writers.

TV writers who are going in for staffing, they’re going in to meet with showrunners and they’re talking to the showrunners, but they’re not writing a spec episode of NCIS to land a staff job on NCIS. Where we do see this happening sometimes in TV and I think increasingly in TV is there’s a lot more TV shows that are based on underlying IP. And so you might be going in to meet with a company that owns a property and so you’re going in to pitch on that property, pitch doing a show on that property. And that’s where the same kind of thing could happen to a TV writer that happens to feature writers all the time which is where they’re asking, oh hey, could you just give us those notes about what your plan was for this thing.

So, TV writers should listen up as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everybody who works as a writer in our industry should listen to this. And I’m really glad that you guys are doing this. I’m learning along with everybody else at home about how you guys are going to be doing No Writing Left Behind, but I’m just going to say prospectively and with great hope that there is a large component where the guild does its job to enforce this so that it’s not simply membership on the frontlines individually on their own taking these little thousands of micro-stands, but rather that the guild lets companies know that we’re doing this and that we’re watching and we’re listening. And if they break this rule we’re coming for them because it is a pure violation of–

**John:** It is. All that stuff is sort of down the road. This first wave today is just making sure everyone understands that this is happening and that it needs to stop happening.

So let’s talk about how it happens for you and for me and sort of the natural ways it comes to be. Because I remember the very first job that I booked, it was How to Eat Fried Worms. It was a project over at Imagine. And this was literally the first screenwriting job I was going after to try to get hired for. And so I pitched my little heart out. I don’t remember whether it was in that meeting or in a phone call afterwards they asked like, oh, could you just send over what you wrote. They could see that I had a three-page document that I was pitching off of. And then over the next couple of months I went through that pitch with them several times down to the point where like I was making changes to that document and sending it back in.

That’s not good. But that’s how I started. So I certainly have done it. Craig, did you do that early on? Have you done it since then?

**Craig:** I’ve done it really once in that kind of way. I mean, every now and then, like I say, for instance if I’m going to be hired, somebody says, “Look, we want to hire you but we just need to know generally what it is that you’re thinking about doing,” I might say, look, here’s a couple of pages. But you’re only talking to me and this is just really kind of a general descriptor. But I could just as easily just come and say it to you. It’s not like you can do anything with this stuff. And then it’s fine.

And I should stop doing that, too, just because it might give them ammunition to say to other writers, “Well, you know, other people do it.” But there was one time where I was coming back from the Weinstein Wars. I had full PTSD. I was a shattered wreck. And I was just trying to find a job. And they were making a sequel to a comedy. It was a comedy that did pretty well. It didn’t do great. They never ended up making the sequel. But they were talking about making the sequel and the director is a nice guy. And they said, “Look, we want you to do it. You’re the only guy we’re talking to.” And he had a guy working for him who I still to this day loathe. And they, you know, it was mostly the other guy but they were like, “Well, yeah, you could write down what you think.” And then it just became – I was getting notes on a thing.

And then not only – do you know I lost the job to “we’re not making the movie.” That’s who I lost the job to. And I lost my ever-loving S on this dude. I have never been so loud, so incensed, and angry, and irate at someone on the phone. And lucky for him it was the phone. I apologized maybe for the tone but not for the content of what I said.

Anyway, he’s not in the business anymore. But I am.

**John:** Yeah. You’re in the business. He’s gone.

**Craig:** Gone.

**John:** You know, so what you’re describing is probably the most flagrant example where they say like, “Hey, would you write up this that you are describing?” Basically rather than coming in, why don’t you just write it up and we’ll read it. And that’s probably the most flagrant version of this.

I think what happens more often, and in talking with other screenwriters, is you have a good meeting and then afterwards they call or email and say like, “Hey, could you just send over that thing that you had with you? It would be really helpful because when I pitch it to my boss I want to keep all the details straight.” It’s that sort of hey like would you be a pal, or I’m trying to help you out here, or let’s be a team.

Very rarely anymore does somebody ask for the literal notes that I brought in with me. So like at the end of the meeting they’re like, “Hey, could you hand us that thing?” That I’m not seeing as much anymore. I’m not getting reports of that as much anymore. I will hear sometimes from writers who they did – at the end of the meeting they thought it was their job to sort of hand them this document. It tends to be the people who really write out full pitches and they’re sort of like reading off their pitch as they’re in the room. And that’s not a style of a pitch that I’m ever a fan of.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if you’re going to do that, it’s just like the transcript of what you pitched.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can – it’s so technical right? I mean, you can actually – the one thing I don’t want anyone to feel like the guild is doing is suggesting to them how they ought to work, or how they ought to create their ideas or imagine or invent things. You can do pretty much anything you want. You can actually bring – if you wanted to write everything up you could. You could bring it in and have those images pasted on a board. And you can do whatever – you just can’t give it to them.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the key. You just can’t give it to them. You can do anything else. And by the way if they sit there and they take notes, all they’ve done is just record things you’ve said. They can’t copyright that. They don’t own those notes at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Any more than you might own if you sit and watch one of their movies and take notes and go, OK, now I’ve written a – it doesn’t work that way. That’s just notes. That doesn’t count.

**John:** Well, let’s walk through sort of why leave behinds are bad idea. Because I broke it out into several different categories of types of bad ideas it is. And really I want to start with the creative process and sort of how leave behinds hurt the creative process.

For me, what happened on this first project and it’s happened other times when people have turned in stuff is that you get trapped in revisions before you’ve even written the thing. And so suddenly you’re revising this set of notes that really aren’t the final document that you’re supposed to be basing everything around.

So you do all the what-if’ing and you kind of never get to write a first draft because you’re always just trying to perfect this document which is not a screenplay at all. It’s not really anything like the final document. You are trapped in revisions before there’s a thing to revise.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you have invited other voices in at a stage when there should be no other voices. I mean, you can have voices if you want to collaborate with somebody intentionally, that’s great. And that works all the time. I’ve done that lots of times. But the one thing I don’t want in my head when I’m coming up with – because I outline everything. I like writing these things for myself. You know, we work differently in that regard.

But what I don’t want is some studio’s voice in my head while I’m doing it. This is the only time I’ll have that’s mine. Do you know what I mean? So it can just be me. And everything can feel unified to what I want it to be. And when you let people get involved in this part by doing these sorts of things you have given away any hope that there will ever be any purity or sort of clean continuity to your story. It’s now been committee-ized from the jump. And at that point what possible good can come of that? I don’t see much.

**John:** Now, in the TV process you will turn in outlines. And so for Episode 3 you will turn in to the studio and to the network this is the outline for Episode 3 and they’ll have specific things they want to see before you go off to do script. That is part of the process of television.

Here’s the key difference. You are a paid writer on that television show. This is a thing they are paying you to do is to write this document which they will approve and note and make changes to before you write the script. But you’re not trying to get hired to do the job. You are already being paid to do the job. And that is really a crucial difference here because your motivations behind making those changes or not making those changes are different when it is your job to do this versus I hope someday to be employed doing this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s that weird per-episode kind of way of looking at television and how you’re paid. But, yeah, you have a job. You work in a room. And you’re absolutely right.

This stuff where you don’t have any job and all of it contingent on you trusting these people, because they’ll tell you that you’re the person. They’ll tell you they’re not talking to anybody else. They’ll tell you the job is basically yours but they just have to show something to somebody. They’ll tell you that there’s no way for them to get you hired. They want to hire you but they can’t get you hired unless there’s something they can somebody. They have so many excuses. So many things. And you have to believe all of it. And I don’t believe all of anything anyone says in any business, but in this business, I mean, why even pretend that people aren’t lying at a minimum of 40% of the time.

**John:** Yeah. So when I talk to writers who have done leave-behinds, it’s often about, well, I wanted to get the job. And so I would say the second thing to remember about leave-behinds is in many cases they hurt you getting the job. And so what Craig described with the project that just went away, that happens a lot. And when they have a written document in front of them they have the opportunity to pick apart and over-interpret little things in one sentence on an outline that aren’t reflective of what the actual screenplay would be. Outlines aren’t screenplays. They don’t have dialogue. They don’t have everything else that a script has that makes it feel like a plan for a movie.

This is a plan for a plan for a movie. And so it’s necessarily going to feel underdone. It’s not going to be the same experience as reading a script. And so so often I truly believe you’re hurting your chances of landing that job if you turn in that document and are working through revisions on that document. Because if you’re doing it, probably somebody else is pitching them on that same thing and is going through that as well. You’re not getting yourself any further in the process.

**Craig:** And you are immediately subjugated. There is a very brief window where you are potentially treated as well as you ought to be all the time as a writer. And that’s in the beginning. Because people are excited about you, hopefully. They are hopeful that you are going to bring something special to this project. They’re desperate for it to get made. Every time they hire a writer they are doing it the way that a dying person is trying some new potential miracle drug. Literally. That’s how they approach things through just abject fear and worry and so there’s a moment there where you can be a hero. And you are the beneficiary of a certain amount of positivity and optimism and trust and confidence.

And those things, which we should get anyway, are very helpful I think in the beginning when you’re trying to be creative because you feel like the wind is at your back. You feel supported. You feel believed in. And so you’re not terrified. And you’re not exhausted. And you’re not emotionally all balled up in a fist.

When you do this you immediately just become the thing that they can kick around. There it is. Now you’ve handed it to them. Now they can read through it. Now they can just start hitting it, punching it, punching you, hitting you. It’s mundane. And you never get a chance to feel like you’re special. You begin the process as some sort of draft horse that they can whack at with a stick. And the emotional cost of that is very real and I think even if you are the sort of person that doesn’t care about what it’s doing to your mind and your heart, you should. At the very least I think it negatively impacts the quality of the work you do.

**John:** So often in early in my career I would go into pitch on projects that I didn’t really want. They weren’t dream projects for me. But like well that’s a job. That’s a thing I could do. I could do this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I’d go in and I’d pitch on them. But I can imagine if I had turned in that five-page outline for it, you know, that eight-page, ten-page outline for it, well, then there’s sort of a sunk cost fallacy. Even though I haven’t gotten paid it’s like, well, emotionally I’ve invested this much in it so I’m going to keep going. I’m going to keep trying to win this project. Even this thing that I didn’t really want so much at the start, but I’ve done this work now and I want to see this thing happen. So I think that’s the other sort of danger that comes with you getting the job is because you now have this sense of like, well, if I walk away then all that work I’ve done is for naught. And so often you probably should just feel free to walk away.

**Craig:** You should always feel free to walk away. Of course, for a lot of the writers that we’re talking about sometimes they just need work.

**John:** They need work.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s not as simple as well it’s a job and I could use a job. You know, I’ve been pretty lucky in the sense that once I started working I never drifted out of the zone of, you know, well I could use a job here as opposed to I need a job. I never got close to if I don’t get a job in blankety-blank weeks or days I’m in trouble. Right?

But there are people who end up in that and I think frankly more and more people are like that because of the way this business has evolved and the way that they make so many fewer movies. And I think just pay less to newer writers. And they need a job. They need it. And this is the part where I think it’s really important that the guild works hand in glove with the membership because somebody who needs a job is going to hear this and say, “Yeah, absolutely. I get it completely. Also, I need a job. I’ve got two kids and a husband and car payments and a mortgage and if I don’t have a job in the next four weeks then we have a huge problem.” So we’ve got to figure – we’ve got to help that person so that they’re able to take a stand without feeling like they’re going to lose that job to somebody who is willing to break the rule.

**John:** Yeah. The last part I would put under this subheading is that in terms of getting the job or sort of like the creative process of working with those people on this project is if I’m in the room pitching on something I can sort of see their reaction and I can sort of feel like, OK, this is where they’re having an issue. If they have a question they can ask that question. They can see my enthusiasm. They can see what I’m gearing up for.

If I send in a document I don’t see any of that. It’s a monologue rather than a dialogue. And so the conversation of being in the room and talking to the people who are responsible for trying to make a movie or seeing what they’re really going for is crucial. And so if I’m sitting across from a director and get a sense of what kind of movie they want to make, I can tailor my pitch and my discussion to the kind of movie they want to make and see if there’s some common ground. Versus if I send in that document I have no idea what that director is looking for. I have no idea what they’re really getting out of this document that I’ve sent. And so that’s, again, a reason why a face-to-face meeting or at least a phone conversation is better than sending through a document.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes I like a little basis of conversation. You know, so I’ve done that before. It’s funny, the thing that I hate the most is that feeling that I need to sell somebody in the room about something. I find it demeaning to everybody. And I wish I could say to all of Hollywood at once, oh wait, I am. I’m doing it right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Pitches are stupid. Pitches are dumb. Everything that you do, and you meaning studios, everything you do to try and kick the tires and get some sort of glimpse into the future of what this script is going to be is stupid. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to be that. And somebody who is really good at pitching may not be really good at writing. And somebody who is terrible at pitching may be amazing at writing. And sometimes the best writers have no idea what the script is going to be. All they know is they have some massive pounding wad of passion in their chest for it.

And that is the person that’s going to do the best job for you. And sometimes you’re getting flimflammed by some just grinder.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** And I just wish I could just say to all of them stop this stupid, pointless, ridiculous jumping through hoops nonsense. It doesn’t translate. If it did you wouldn’t be so angry and disappointed all the time.

**John:** There was a project I did for Disney where I was producing and not writing it. And it was really eye-opening to be on the other side and hearing these pitches because I got to see how different writers were pitching it. I think they were all writing teams for this one.

And I felt their frustration and I felt frustration because this was a first step and then we’d go in and pitch to the CE and then we’d go and pitch to Sean Bailey. And it was just not a well set up process. It was not going to be a good process I think for getting the best work out of people.

But what you describe in terms of like feeling that passion, feeling that excitement, that is the value of being in the room to talk with people about a project. And so while I agree that like sort of pitching through the beat-by-beat plot details of a script is not going to be – that shouldn’t be the standard by which you get hired or not get hired for a job – I do believe in that sort of face-to-face meeting where you can see like, oh, I get why you’re so excited about this project.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that we’re all on the same vibe. That we have the same vision for what the project is. That is, I think, invaluable. It’s the let me read from my outline for what this movie is going to be that I don’t think is helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think it is either and, yeah, I just think that they have pretty much all the information they need. They’ve read something that this writer has written.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Right. So they know. OK, you can write something. I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you. Do you want to write this? OK, great. Let me look at your face. Oh, you really want to – you love it. Talk to me about, just have a conversation. Forget the story. That’s the part – like if I were running a studio I would say don’t tell me anything about the story you’re going to do. I’ll have a chance to correct that later if I think you’ve done something wonky. Right now I just want to know why. Tell me about what it is about this story, these characters, this world that gets you going that makes you want to write. And I guarantee you if it’s a conversation like that the writer will end up saying more of value that is story oriented and that is predictive than they would if they were forced to come up with some fake sub-movie.

I mean, we’re already faking a movie on paper. Now we’ve got to fake a movie before we fake the movie? Ugh. Anyway, so yeah. This is a separate thing, but I completely agree that being in the room in that regard is really, really important and that there are huge dangers to leaving things behind beyond the legal dangers or abuses, but rather there are creative dangers. I completely agree.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s wrap up by talking about how leaving stuff behind hurts other writers. And I think it lowers the bar. It sets the expectation that everyone else is doing it so if you don’t do it then you’re not a team player and you surely won’t be taken seriously on going in on a project. And there’s some truth to that and some fallacy to that. But it just sets this expectation that everyone is doing this so why aren’t you doing this.

And the truth is most people aren’t doing this. Two-thirds of writers are not leaving material behind. And they shouldn’t be leaving material behind. And we could get that number down to zero if everyone just would actually stop doing it and everyone would stop asking for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And here’s, I guess I could say this much. For the times that I’ve done it, like I’ve said, it’s been very de minimis. It’s just been, you know, a couple of pages and not a pitch or an outline or a story. It’s really just more about me putting into words the sort of thing that I would just say about why I would love to do something. It was an expression of enthusiasm. So if anybody ever says, “Well, you know, Craig Mazin gave me some, or John August gave me,” I think the two of us can say to everybody now, no, that’s not true. So at least we can get off the hook.

**John:** I certainly did – 20 years ago I did.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** And I do not do that now. So let’s talk about how you say no. And how you can say no in a way that is positive rather than just sort of being negative. And we’ll link to a video that has Billy Ray and Andrea Berloff and some other folks talking about how you say no to leave-behinds.

But for me when I’ve been asked I will usually say like, oh, these are just for me. These wouldn’t even make sense to you. And that’s actually kind of true. The type of document I bring in to a pitch tends to be not really complete sentences or like good English. It’s just like a scattering of thoughts about sort of how to get through this pitch. Because I’ve really prepared this as like this is what I’m going to say. This is how I’m going to get through talking about like why I’m excited for this project, sort of who the characters are, what the world is, you know, the bullet points.

But this thing I’m carrying into the room would not make sense to them. And I think that’s a true thing I can say and I think it’s a thing that many writers can say when asked about could you give me that thing or email me that thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve done that very same thing as well and there’s nothing they can do about it. You can say it’s literally garbage for me. It’s cue cards. It’s not real words.

**John:** Increasingly I pitch off of boards. So I go in with a bunch of black art boards that have images on them and I’m using that as sort of the framing device for the pitch and that’s how I’m really going through the story, so I’m not even looking back at a written document. A natural question will come up, well could I send through a PDF of those images or whatever. I guess. That’s not writing. That’s just collecting. So something like a look book that doesn’t have text in it, I guess that’s sort of your call. If it gives them a sense of like what your thing felt like, OK. But that’s not writing. And that’s not your writing work. And it’s about making sure that you’re being paid for your writing because that’s what being a professional screenwriter means.

**Craig:** Literary material. That’s what we’re paid to do. So if it’s not literary material you can bring it to them. If you want to bring them look books, pictures, you want to bring them a song, you want to bring them statuary, I don’t care.

**John:** Yeah, do it.

**Craig:** You just can’t give them the stuff that they’re supposed to pay us for specifically as per the WGA deal and that’s writing.

**John:** Yep. Now, there are situations that are true spec projects, so like Go was a spec script. And so the script goes out and I meet with people and I describe sort of what the movie is and here’s literally the script. That’s fine, too. I’ve also sold things off of an outline. You sold things as an outline.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That’s valid, too, because they’re literally buying this thing. They’re not buying you writing this movie and here along the way are some free stuff you’re doing. If they’re buying the thing that’s fine. And maybe they’re buying the script and they’re buying a budget and a production plan. That’s great. That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s going in to pitch on a project and then leaving that written pitch behind.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the simple way of looking at it is this. Who initiated this? If it’s your work, that is to say it’s original to you, that means you have copyright in it. You can show it to anybody you want. You can put it online. Doesn’t matter, because it’s yours. You own it. Nobody can have it until they pay you for it. But if they initiate it then it’s partly theirs and then, well, then you can’t get into the business of writing unless they pay you.

**John:** If a studio has the Slinky movie and you’re going in to pitch on the Slinky movie, you are one of five writers, 10 writers, 15 writers going in to pitch on the Slinky movie. If you start leaving written material behind then you are basically, in addition to creating a huge copyright mess, you’re creating a free brain trust to do their development work for them. And, you know, the odds are the Slinky movie doesn’t get made and part of the reason why it doesn’t get made or doesn’t even go to script is because they see all this written material and they’re like, wow, Slinky movie is a terrible idea. And, you know, you and 15 other writers have just spent a week of your time writing up this imaginary movie that will never be.

**Craig:** You know what’s so depressing to me is that we always talk about the Slinky movie and if you gave me a million years I couldn’t write a good Slinky movie. But Lord and Miller could. They could. I just know it.

**John:** They absolutely could. Look at the Lego Movie. Fantastic.

**Craig:** They would make a Slinky movie that would literally make me sob at the end. Those guys.

**John:** They’re so good.

**Craig:** They’re really good.

**John:** Yeah. That new Spider Man movie looks amazing.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it does look really funny.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s also leave with some ways out of this. And so let’s say you are a producer or a studio or production entity that really believes that you want to see this material along the way. Congratulations. There’s a way to do it. There’s actually minimums. You can just buy an outline. You can buy a treatment. These are all things you could be paying people money for. And that’s a way through this if you feel like you really want to be seeing that written material. Ask people to write stuff up and then pay them money for writing it up. That is a thing you can do and then you would own the copyright on the stuff that they wrote up. That would be a good choice for those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Makes total sense to me. Just protect yourself. I mean, at this point, hopefully people understand roughly what the rules are here. You know what would be really great? If people didn’t have to rely on you and me, but rather their agents and lawyers told them these things.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Wow. That’s great.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Even their managers could say that.

**Craig:** I mean, they’re paying them. Right. They’re paying them and they’re not paying us. We don’t take their money. So it seems like the people that take their money should give them this advice.

**John:** Can you imagine if a manager or an agent said like, “Oh hell no, you should absolutely not do that,” when in fact when we asked screenwriters they said like, “Oh yeah, my agent said it’s fine. That everyone does it.”

**Craig:** Right. What does it cost them? Nothing.

**John:** It costs them 10% of nothing.

**Craig:** It costs them 10% of nothing. Exactly. They don’t care. Basically their whole deal is get some work. Right? And I’m not going to tell you to not do it because I already told me other client and he’s going to do it, and then she said she was going to do it. So whatever. They don’t care.

**John:** Because remember their relationship is with you but their relationship is also with that person at the studio or that producer who are buyers. And so they do not want to piss off that buyer because that’s an important relationship for them. So if you play along and write up that thing for free for them, well, it helps their relationship because their client is a team player and will turn in that document for free.

**Craig:** Team player.

**John:** Team player.

**Craig:** Do you know that studios have a company that they create to be the WGA signatory, you know, to pay you. Some of them it is the company, like Universal I think it’s Universal. But sometimes they have these little sub-names. Do you know what the Weinstein Company, their pay out company was?

**John:** I’m sure it’s on my old contract but tell me.

**Craig:** Team Players.

**John:** Oh man.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? That tells you everything you need to know. Anytime somebody tells you you need to be a team player, run away. Because they’re not team players. If they were team players they would be playing with you on your team, too. They’re not. They’re just saying do what I want you to do. Because we’re on a team together that I own and you don’t. And I’ll decide when you get paid as being part of this team. Or not. And also I can fire you off of this team.

That’s not a team. There’s no team.

**John:** Not really a team.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** There’s no team players. You know the team that you should be on as a writer is your own team and your family’s team. That’s your team. Don’t be fooled by anybody that tells you you need to be a “team player.” And I will assure you that there are a ton of people out there doing just fine who have terrible attitudes about being a team player. Like me. The worst.

**John:** Yes. The worst. So let’s actually segue to the happier version of this which is sort of the craft version of like what stuff might you write up for your own purposes before you go in to that room? Because we’re definitely not saying that you can’t do pre-writing, you can’t do stuff for yourself, because I actually find the process of writing before you start writing to be an incredibly crucial time. It’s actually probably my favorite time–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because anything is possible and you’re gathering. You’re figuring out like what is meaningful about this idea to me. What is it that is possible? What’s exciting? Who are the characters? What is the world like? What are the challenges? How does this fit into like a two-hour timeline, or oh, is it actually a series? This idea is appealing to me and that very early writing is really important to me. So let’s talk about that early writing from the conception up through you are into the room to pitch.

**Craig:** Well, again, I’m going to sort of cut it off from the pitch part because I don’t really do that now. If I’m going to do something I’m just sort of like, look, can I do this? Should I do this? Will I do it? Let’s have a discussion, then I’m doing it.

But the process regardless, whether it comes before or after that, it’s pretty much the same for me. I begin by just thinking about the story in a sort of vague general sense. And then I just start having conversations with myself–

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** About what it could be. And I begin doing note cards and sort of laying things out and Identity Thief I was hanging out with Jason Bateman the other day and he reminded me that for Identity Thief we went to a Dodger game and somewhere between the second and seventh inning I had sketched out essentially the plot on a napkin. And you can do this. It’s a very sort of skeleton-like thing. And then you begin to expand that part. And then I do – really do – enjoy writing a very long kind of expanded document that really forces me to start thinking about things before I start writing because you know psychologically the thing I fear the most is the terror of writing myself into a corner that I can’t get out of, or not knowing what’s supposed to happen and feeling overwhelmed. And this helps me not be overwhelmed because when I’m working in prose it just seems like it’s much, much lower stakes.

And so anyway that all works for me. And, yeah, I could theoretically hand all of that over in order to get a job. But no. Never.

**John:** No. Yeah, for me the early process is once you sort of have an idea in your head you put on these kind of goggles and you’re sort of looking at the world saying like is this part of my movie, is this part of my movie? Does this fit inside my universe? And you’re sort of gathering and collecting things.

And I will make a folder and I will just throw images in there. If there’s stuff that sort of makes sense. I’ll type up little notes just on my notes app on my phone. Just for what something feels like. If it’s based on an existing movie or a book I’ll watch the movie several times. I’ll go through the book and highlight stuff that’s especially meaningful to me. You’re just in the process of collection.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And before I would go in to pitch on something I used to write kind of detailed pitches, were sort of a transcript of what I anticipated saying in there. And I don’t do anything like that at all anymore. And instead what I’ll tend to do is figure out what the images are that reflect the world, reflect the characters, reflect some sort of big crucial beats. And so just a lot of Google image searching for actors who feel like the right people or just production designs or settings that feel right for this. I’ll put those on a folder. I’ll print them on the color printer. I’ll spray glue them to my art boards. And it’s really a process of going through those art boards that gives me a sense of like, oh, I’m missing something here. What am I missing? Oh, I’m kind of missing a beat. I’m missing a moment. I’m missing a character who could do this thing.

And so that process is really where I’m feeling like this is what the movie is going to look like. This is what it’s going to feel like. This is the world of the movie.

So, all I’m taking into that pitch meeting is these boards and a really one-pager basically of reminders to me of like I’m going to start the conversation by talking about why I want to do this, what the movie feels like to me. These are some crucial thematic elements. And here’s how I’m introducing the most important characters.

And then it ends up being kind of bullet-pointy as you get through it. But also allows me to have it be more of a conversation. So as I’m showing boards they can ask questions. They can sort of get involved in the process as well.

So, there’s not a thing for me to be leaving behind because it’s just sort of my set up for things rather than the whole movie on paper.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting listening to you talk about that process. Something occurred to me, and it’s why I don’t bring the boards in like you do, I think, it’s because I’m very private about that time in a young story’s life. You know? That beginning part where you’re sort of reaching and grasping and making choices and realizing you’re missing something and going back and finding those images, or those moments that mean something. I’m very private about them. I feel like no one should see them until I want them to see them. And so I think that may be why I’m so kind of weird about all that stuff because I just feel like – and it could be just emotional. It could be superstitious. But I just feel like in a weird way if I show it too soon it will be wrong.

Do you know what I mean? Like it’s not meant to be in the air yet. It’s supposed to still be in a womb. So, yes, it’s an interesting thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s why there’s not, again, what we said earlier on, this is not prescribing one way to pitch or like one way for a writer to work. I really like having these boards so I can point to a thing, and therefore at the end of the pitch if they want to refer back to a moment they can find that board and point to this board, ask a question about that thing. It makes things a little bit more concrete. But that’s not the only way it can work.

And likewise after I’ve gotten a job I don’t write that long outline that you do. I am happy to sort of write myself into a corner and then write my way out of the corner because I want to be surprised. I want to be surprised at the end of a scene. Like, oh, I kind of thought the scene was going to go into this next scene, but actually I don’t need that next scene now because this actually did the job of that. And so as a viewer I really want to see what’s happening with these people.

And so I don’t tend to write those outlines anymore for myself or for anybody.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re unique snowflakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just like the Alt-Right accuses us of being. [laughs]

**John:** All right, let’s answer a listener question. Heston writes, “John, in 2008 you wrote an article about why character’s wants versus needs is a load of BS. Wants versus needs has become an even bigger must have when planning characters as more gurus have popped up in books, videos, and podcasts on the craft. So, when throwing protagonist ideas about in your head what method do both of you use when constructing character metamorphoses. I’m talking about the character has a goal and a mindset attached to why they want that external goal, but something else happens and they realize a better path and by the end they’ve changed regardless of the external goal’s accomplishments.”

So, Craig, I suspect you don’t say want versus need, but do you think you still have a want versus need built into your storytelling?

**Craig:** That’s not an axis that I consider. I generally think a character wants something. Need is a really dumb word I think for story.

**John:** I think it’s a dumb word.

**Craig:** It’s dumb. It’s like what do you need? You need to breathe and you need food. I mean, you can live alone and miserable for the rest of your life, but like the needs are – it’s wants. I like to boil it down to wants. And the way I consider the axis of character change is that the character at the beginning of a story wants to keep things the way they are out of fear of something going wrong, or out of fear of the world around them. Anyway, just some general fear. They want what they have now not to change. And it changes. Or they want something to change and it’s not changing. Doesn’t matter. They want something. And by the end they will realize, and sort of in the middle towards the end the realize what they were wanting they don’t want anymore. They want something else that’s much, much harder to get and will require much, much more fortitude.

So it’s about the fact that your wants change, which is essentially what we go through in life as humans. I mean, all these books, they’re trying to remove you from why these things came around in the first place which was they’re reflective of your life now. You don’t need a book to tell you that you want – OK, Heston, maybe you met a girl and you wanted – you wanted so much to be in a relationship with her. And lo and behold she wanted to be in a relationship with you. And it happened. And then somewhere along the line you did not want to be in a relationship with her. That’s the way life works. And now what happens? Right?

And then you say I don’t want to be in a relationship with you, and then the minute that happens you realize, oh no, I’ve made a terrible mistake and you regret it. And now you do want to be – because you’ve changed. This is how we tell stories. We’re just reflecting the way life works. So forget all this junk and stop reading books.

**John:** I agree. I gave a presentation at Austin last year about want and one of the points I tried to make is that want versus need is a trap. You can think that you’re actually building great character development and arcs by like, oh, they realized what they really need is this thing. And I think it’s a dumb thing that somebody came up with at some point and people have been trying to enact.

A thing I will point out about needs is they feel like taking your medicine. It feels like one of those things where the character doesn’t choose to do a thing. They are forced to do a thing.

So what’s useful is to think about anytime you say the character needs to do something, try replacing needs with wants. And ask what would it be like if the character wanted to do this thing. So rather than I need to call my mom, it’s like I want to call my mom. Well, that implies there’s something about your relationship with your mom that is actually interesting and it’s not sort of every other relationship with somebody’s mom.

So, replacing needs with wants is a way to think about it. But this general dogma of want versus need is a dumb way to go through it.

**Craig:** So dumb. It’s like somebody needed to fill in a chart in their stupid book.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And I would also say that it probably reflects how English does some things. If you study other languages the breakdown of want versus need, should, have to, it’s a spectrum. It’s a big rainbow. And the equivalent words end up in different places on that spectrum. And so it’s just a very English way of thinking about this stuff because we have a differentiation between those words that are specific that doesn’t exist in other languages, too. Because it doesn’t really exist in people. The things we want and the things we need, it’s all blurry.

**Craig:** I wish I could Thanos snap and make all of that crap go away. All of it.

**John:** All of it.

**Craig:** Although I will tell you that every now and then I do have to recommend a book to someone. I was at a charity event and I ran into a guy that I know. He’s in the banking industry. And he said to me, you know, by the way I’m writing a script. And I went, oh, I’m opening a bank. He didn’t get the joke.

Anyway, but he asked me a question about – he said is it OK if I’m writing in Microsoft Word. I said, yeah, if you follow the general format you can write in anything you want. He said, so, when I’m doing like the character and then colon, and I went, wait–

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Stop. What colon? There’s no colons. And he goes there’s no colons? And I’m like, nah, there’s no colons. You know what? Pick up Syd Field. So that one I was like, OK, you know–

**John:** Or how about download any script off the Internet and sort of see what the general formatting is.

**Craig:** At that point I wasn’t sure why that hadn’t already happened. So I kind of skipped more specific advice. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, let’s be realistic. You sent him to Syd Field because you knew it would frustrate him and he would stop writing his script. Because he should stay a banker.

**Craig:** No, no. Everybody should write one. Just like everybody should own a bank. But it’s so much harder to own a bank.

**John:** Don’t we all own our own banks in a way? Aren’t we always like loaning ourselves or giving ourselves credit?

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** I am my own bank.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. You might actually be. I could see that. But for the rest of us, no.

**John:** No. All right, let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article from The New York Times called The Confidence Gap. It’s by Claire Shipman, Katty Kay, and JillEllyn Riley. It was recommended by friend Dara Resnick. It is a really good little look at sort of how young women, sort of tweens and teens, go through struggles of confidence and sort of like ways to talk to them about the struggles that they face. It’s geared towards tweens and teens and yet most of the recommendations in there I could use on a daily basis.

So, the way we can ruminate about our failures and set ourselves up for future failures is worth looking at kind for everybody. So, a good article about thinking through the psychology of stuff goes wrong and how you learn from it and move on to the next thing. And how you keep from escalating when stuff goes bad.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, I mean, I don’t know if this really counts as a One Cool Thing, but I think it’s freaking cool. So, John, do you use DirecTV or cable television?

**John:** I use DirecTV.

**Craig:** I was also a DirecTV customer. And I just dumped them. I got rid of them. So, my daughter said why do we even have DirecTV? Why don’t we have YouTube TV? And I was like, what? What teenage nonsense is this? And then I looked into it and I was like, oh yeah, this is probably better. So it’s way cheaper and so YouTube TV they actually do have broadcast channels. They have all the basic channels you would want live and they also – I think I pay $5 extra to get AMC. And then of course if you want HBO you just buy the HBO service. And when all was said and done it was still like one-third of my DirecTV bill.

And I think DirecTV has some sort of app that does this as well, but the YouTube TV thing works really well on my phone and my tablet and now in my office I have television. Anyway, it’s really easy to do. It’s seamless and it works brilliantly. I hate giving credit to massive, you know, Google Company, right, with all their crap that’s on regular YouTube. But YouTube TV actually as a service makes a ton of sense. And so we have eliminated the DirecTV. And we also don’t need those stupid boxes anymore. They’re all gone.

**John:** So, is there any equivalent of a DVR with this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s a digital–?

**Craig:** It’s actually better than the DVR because DVR you would have to go into that box thing which is actually very poorly – when it was TiVo it was awesome, but DirecTV’s OS or whatever they call it, their GUI, it sucks.

But on YouTube you’re just like, oh yeah, I like this show. And you just tap on it, and put it in my library. And it just knows. It’s quite – it’s really good.

**John:** All right. We’ll check that out. Also, while you’re mentioning TV stuff, I want to thank everybody on Twitter. I had asked a question about I really want my mom who is 82 to be able to watch Netflix, basically The Crown and The Great British Baking Show, and other things that I think she would really enjoy. But adding one more box to her setup is just not going to work. She would rebel against it.

And so people had really good suggestions for ways to get around it. I think we’re going to end up with it turns out her cable is Xfinity and I can actually just add it through her cable system. So, I’ll do that. But I want to thank everybody who – like 70 people reached out with good suggestions.

**Craig:** Good lord. My god.

**John:** Twitter doing something good.

**Craig:** That’s weird. That’s not the normal thing.

**John:** Not the normal what Twitter does.

**Craig:** That’s not the Twitter I know.

**John:** To bring everything back around, No Writing Left Behind, don’t leave writing behind is the message we’re trying to get to people. So, don’t do it. Craig will come and beat you up if you do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll at least yell at you sternly.

**John:** Yeah. No physical violence. Just–

**Craig:** I’m not particularly good at that I must admit. But I can be intimidating just volume wise.

**John:** Yeah. I can be shouty, too. Rarely happens, but.

**Craig:** I know. But every now and then daddy’s got a bark.

**John:** Daddy does bark, yeah.

**Craig:** Yep. I’ve done it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Brown. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re kind of low on the outros. They’ve trickled down, so we need some new outros. So people, fire it up. Rajesh Naroth, if you’re listening we need some new outros.

That same address, ask@johnaugust.com, is where you can send questions like the one we answered today. You can find us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four to five days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. If you sign up for the premium service, which is $2 a month, you get all of those back episodes.

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** Plus bonus episodes like the random advice episode we’re recording. So actually it should be up there by the time you hear this. So you should subscribe for $2 a month and get all of those back episodes.

**Craig:** That alone is worth $2.

**John:** It’s worth $2. Craig, thank you for another fun show.

**Craig:** Thanks John. See you next time.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

Links:

* Hope to see you this weekend at the [Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/aff/live/)! You can also catch John at the [Texas Book Festival](https://www.texasbookfestival.org/) and the [Boulder Book Store Event](https://www.boulderbookstore.net/event/john-august-arlo-finch-valley-fire)
* [No Writing Left Behind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GhZMFTtags)
* [The Confidence Gap](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/well/family/confidence-gap-teen-girls-tips-parents.html) by Claire Shipman, Katty Kay and JillEllyn Riley for The New York Times
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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is [sings] Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 366 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be looking at how you end things, both in a narrative and in life. Specifically, what happens to your work after you die?

Hey, Craig, in general what happens after you die?

Craig: Nothing. So I asked my dad this question when I was very young and he gave me what I still consider to be the very best answer anyone has ever come up.

John: All right.

Craig: I said what happens after you die and he said, “It’s just like it was before you were born.” And that is the correct answer.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Nothing. You’re done.

John: Yep. You do live in people’s memories until they die.

Craig: Yeah. That’s meaningless. This is a meaningless ride. It’s a great ride. I love this ride so much. I’m so sad that it will end, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like no one goes on a roller coaster ride and says, “Now, when this ride is over do we live forever in a magical place in the sky?” No. No, no, it’s over. But you enjoyed it. Simple as that.

John: So today we will talk about what happens to your work after you die and the decisions you might want to make about your work for after you are no longer on this mortal coil. But first we have some news and some follow up.

So you and I are both on a different podcast. Sometimes we cheat on each other on other podcasts, but this time we went in together. We were sort of swingers. And we went on a different podcast. We went on Jordan, Jesse, Go! which came out last week. It was a fun time. Did you have a good time?

Craig: I did have a good time. It’s so funny because as you know – as everyone knows – I don’t listen to podcasts. So I’m never quite sure what to expect with any particular podcast and I always just assume that it’s going to be exactly like the one we do and it never is. First of all, everyone has much better equipment than we do. But I feel like we sound pretty good.

John: I think we sound pretty good, too. And also they had a good soundproof room, but they were banging their microphones constantly. Did that drive you a little nuts?

Craig: No, I didn’t mind that so much. I was just – mostly – our podcast is a little bit like us. You know, you and I, even though we seem very different, I don’t actually think we are that different. I think we’re both fairly rigid in our ways. And they were much more loosey-goosey improvisational fun. Like you got the feeling that if they wanted they could just spend an hour talking about anything at all and we’re not like that. We like routine. We’re set in our ways.

John: We have an outline. We have a structure. We get back to it. Theirs is just basically pancakes and sex toys. But it was a great conversation about pancakes and sex toys and mountain cabins.

Craig: Yeah. It was nice to take a little vacation from a structured podcast and actually just go bananas. It’s the morning zoo of podcasts. But in a good way. I like morning zoos. I’ve always liked them. I like a nice drive time banter.

John: Always good. But let’s get back to our structure. Dean wrote in to say, “You mentioned on the podcast that, ‘It would probably be quicker for you to write a half-hour than to pull together a pitch for it.’” I’m not sure which one of us said that, but I believe someone said that.

He continues, “I can guess as to how that might be the case, but explicitly what takes time in prepping a pitch? How much time would you spend on a pitch versus writing up a half hour of television comedy?”

So, you and I don’t write half hour comedies, but the overall idea that sometimes it’s just quicker to write it does feel kind of true. When I talk to people who write half hours, it’s really fast. They might spend a lot of time in the room figuring all the beats out–

Craig: Well, there you go.

John: But then when you actually write it it’s quick. Here’s what it was. I bet it was when I had Mindy Kaling on the show and she was talking about pitching a show versus writing a show. And sometimes you can just actually write the show more quickly than you can sort of pull together the full pitch.”

Craig: Look, the thing is if you put a stop watch to it, I doubt that that’s true. However, there is something called ease which is different than speed. Sometimes it’s easier to write the half hour, or write even an entire feature film than it is to pitch it. Because the problem — pitching requires you to know everything ahead of time so you already have to kind of write the movie anyway in your head, or a lot of it, or a lot of the show in your head.

And then be able to, oh, trippingly convey it to somebody in a non-audio visual form and just you talking, right? There’s no show. And that can be very strenuous and very nerve-racking. And you are incredibly aware that it is entirely based on the feeling in the room and whether or not you forget something or trip up or if you use words that are slightly ambiguous because, I mean, remember a script is already an audio-visual work that has been reduced or compressed into text only. Now you’re going to take sort of oral relaying of a text-only version of a thing that’s eventually going to be audio-visual. So at that point you think to yourself, ooh, you know what, the other problem with a pitch is they view it as an act of faith to buy a pitch. Why don’t I just not even go through all that mess? Why don’t I just write the damn thing?

And certainly if you’ve gone through the work that’s required to create and deliver a pitch, you’ve done the work that’s required to write the 30 pages or the 110 pages. So, in those cases the math might work out in your favor to just write it.

John: When David Iserson and Susanna Fogel were on the program they talked about how they ended up specking The Spy Who Dumped Me because it just felt better to write the whole thing and be able to deliver the whole thing versus going in and trying to pitch that idea around town. Sometimes writing is just a process of discovery. So sometimes you really won’t know what the movie is, what the show is, until you’ve written those characters. And so that’s a good example of why you might just want to write the half hour to see what it feels like.

There have been definitely times where I’ve gone in for a pitch and I’ve written scenes that would be in that final movie just to get a sense of the character’s voices, to get a sense of like what is this actually going to feel like.

So, that’s not blanket advice. I won’t say that you should always plan on writing that half hour. And ultimately if you write that half hour and you’re trying to sell that show you’re going to have to be able to pitch it further than that. You’re going to have to be able to describe this is where the show goes, this is how it grows. They’re going to need to sit across sit across from you and understand that like you are a person who can deliver this thing. But maybe writing that 30 pages will help you understand what the show is you want to make.

Craig: The other thing to consider is that when you’re pitching you are essentially in salesman mode which means that they’re in arms-crossed suspicious mode. When you have a script, then there’s an object to discuss. Work has been done. And so it’s a little realer. You know? I mean, people get burned by pitches all the time. I mean to say the pitch buyers get burned by pitches all the time. And they are well aware that sometimes writers need money. And they’re pitching something, they’re pitching their butts off for money, but then the money is just as the writing that you’re going to do is speculative, the money giving is speculative. We don’t know what we’re going to get. And they have been burned. So when you have actual writing I think it just changes the tenor of the conversation anyway in a much better way.

It’s not to say that you shouldn’t or can’t pitch, because I have. It’s just that, I don’t know, the gun is in your hand I think when the writing is there. And the gun is in their hand when you’re dancing for your supper.

John: Yeah. So Dean’s question about how much work are you doing before you go into a pitch, it varies wildly. And so the project I’m writing right now was a pitch. And so I went and I sold the pitch and I got hired to do it. And Megan, our producer, saw me sort of working through developing the pitch. And I think she was probably surprised at sort of like how little I had actually done. How little I had actually put down on paper. But I had done sort of the internal mental work of what is the conversation about this movie and I was able to describe the feelings and sort of what the overall goals of things were. And so if I didn’t have all the plot points really figured out, that really wasn’t the crucial thing for going in to pitch this movie.

It was basically like let me give you this take. Let me show you what this world will feel like. And that is ultimately what they were hiring me for for this movie.

Craig: Well, I will say though that Megan shouldn’t draw too much of an object lesson from that because you are in a different position. Over time the more you do it the less concerned and wary people are. They know that you deliver time and time again. They know you are a responsible professional. It’s a bit like actors when they start out they have to audition. They show up, read the lines in a scene, walk away, hope. And then later on the next step is I’ll come in and I’ll have a general discussion with you but I’m not going to actually audition by reading lines. We can just discuss the character. And then the third step is offer-only. And writers kind of follow those things, too. And we adjust it slightly as do actors depending on the part.

There are plenty of actors who, like for instance if you want to hire Jason Statham to be in your action movie, that’s offer-only. We know Jason Statham can do action. There’s no need to have Jason Statham come in to discuss the character with you. He can do it.

If, however, Jason Statham wants to spread his wings a little bit and maybe, I don’t know, Spielberg is making a movie and there’s this fascinating dramatic part and he wants to play a war surgeon, he might have to come in and meet. He might even want to read for it. You never know. And similarly with us. If there’s something that’s kind of – like if you want to write a Star Wars movie, my guess is you got to have a pretty lengthy conversation about what it is you want to do, especially if it’s their movie. And it doesn’t matter who you are. But if somebody is calling you up, John, and saying, “Listen, we have this movie. It’s going to be kind of, well, it’s family but family plus. So sort of elevated family entertainment.” You’re going to say, great, offer-only.

I mean, I’ll have a conversation with you if you want, but basically the point is if we’re having the conversation that means you want to hire me because you know I do this.

John: Absolutely. And when you and I are brought in to do weekly work, those are essentially offers only. Basically it’s just like, “Hey, we need help on this thing.” And if we go in it’s very clear we can do this job in front of us. But you doing Chernobyl, that is like Jason Statham doing a dramedy. That is not something that everyone would necessarily know is in your wheelhouse, so you do need to be able to describe your vision for what this is more fully.

Craig: Right. And that’s exactly what I did. So I went in with Carolyn Strauss to HBO and sat with [Carrie-Anne Follis] who is the head of their limited series department. And I pitched. And I pitched and I pitched. And I pitched how the series would work, who the characters were, the stories that would happen inside of it. I tried to keep it, you know, somewhat compressed. And it wasn’t kind of an overly rehearsed thing.

What helped there, in television there are so many different ways to stop people from working as they go through. All right, you’re going to write a bible and then you’re going to write an episode. And then we don’t have to do anything after that. And, of course, also in that field, too, is an understanding of and you’re not getting paid what you get paid to write movies. So that all made it kind of easy, but even so there was no question that when I went in there my track record, none of it mattered. None of it. Nor should it have.

John: I mean, your track record in terms of being able to like actually deliver something, like that you’re not going to run off and just disappear into the woods. You would actually give them something, but was it something that they actually wanted? They wouldn’t know that until they’re sitting across from you and ultimately until they’re reading the words.

Craig: Yeah. I think if my track record accomplished anything it was simply that I could get that meeting. That at the drop of a hat I can probably sit down with somebody who runs any division of anything anywhere and say, listen, I have something I want to tell you. But they’re under no obligation to buy anything. All the burden of proof is on me. If somebody wants to make an R-rated comedy where two adults are doing crazy things on the road I don’t really think I need to audition. I’m not going to. So there you go. You’re just going to have to pay me to do that. I’m not going to sit down and dance for that. That’s kind of offer-only. That’s sort of the way it works.

The only thing I think that you or I can count on track record-wise is that we can at least – you like, what’s the job, like have you written horror, like a Leigh Whannell kind of movie?

John: Yeah. I’ve written one of those and I did have to sort of like pitch more fully sort of what my take was on that because it was very off the rank and normal track for me.

Craig: Then you there you go. And so the good news is you can get that meeting no matter what.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: But then you got to work for it. So, it all depends. And obviously when you’re just starting out everybody is dancing for everything. First of all, you’ve got to convince people to even meet with you. And then you got to do a full dance. It’s pretty exhausting, but that’s what youth is for.

John: That is youth. All right, now further follow up, so on last week’s episode it came up that Craig really dislikes ventriloquism. No, no, no, I think you actually hate ventriloquism. You don’t understand ventriloquism. You find no artistic value in ventriloquism.

Craig: None.

John: And I think this is actually a call for a whole new segment on the Scriptnotes podcast so this is being inaugurated right here.

Craig: Oh, new segment.

John: New segment. Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Ah.

John: Yeah. So Craig has very strong opinions, but one of the things I like so much about Craig is that he also believes that other people can change their opinions about things they are obviously wrong about, such as vaccines. Like vaccines are good.

Craig: Right.

John: So, this will be an experiment to see whether we can change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the artistic merits of ventriloquism. So, I welcome all your suggestions for things we can throw at Craig that will make him see that ventriloquism is a true art form. I’m going to start. I started by Googling. I started by Googling “best ventriloquist” and the first video that came up was by a performer named Nina Conti. It is I think terrific and Craig is watching it right now.

So I will describe for people, obviously there will be a link in the show notes, but here is a woman who brings a man up on stage. She affixes a mask to him that she can control the mouth of the mask. And she basically uses him as a ventriloquist dummy. He is helpless and has no control over what he says. Craig, what is your reaction to what Google has told us is best ventriloquist?

Craig: If this is the best ventriloquist ever I can think of no better defense for my position than ventriloquism is crap. Because she’s actually figured out a way to make ventriloquism even easier than it already essentially is. I mean, the hardest part it seems to me of being a ventriloquist is manipulating the multiple things on their stupid dummy. The stupid hands and that dumb face, the eyeballs and the mouth. What she’s done here is, and she seems like a very nice person, don’t get me wrong. A very nice Scottish lady. But what she’s done is she brings somebody out of the audience and puts a little mask on that covers his nose and mouth with her hideous dummy nose/mouth. And then she has that connected to a little thing in her hand that makes the mouth go up and down. That’s it. Now she’s got the hardest part down to just pushing a button repeatedly while she does the silly talking like this.

And he just stands there while people laugh at him. This is terrible. I think it is terrible. I understand why it’s vaguely funny. I do. But it’s just – this is sort of like I never understood Gallagher. Like why are people laughing when he hits the watermelon with the thing? I don’t know. And to me it’s all in the same world of Gallagher. I don’t get it.

John: All right. So a thing I’m surprised you’re not appreciating is the fact that she is talking constantly. So, her breath control is remarkable because it seems like she’s having a conversation with this other person, but she’s actually doing both sides of the conversation. How she’s breathing, how she’s making that all work, do you see the skill involved there?

Craig: No. Ella Fitzgerald had great breath control. Patti LuPone has great breath control. I mean, I can do this because I’m talking like myself and then I’m talking like this. But if I ask you a question, yes, well I just want to know how, how, I just want to, I’m thinking that, well why don’t you just spit it out already? Anyone can do this. Literally anyone. It’s not hard. Just take breaths. And then while the audience laughs you breathe. Because they’re laughing – and listen, I have been accused of making audiences laugh with garbage. So I sympathize on that level.

I’m just saying I don’t get it. I don’t get this. Why ventriloquism is funny. Or hard.

John: All right. So this example has not changed Craig’s mind.

Craig: No. Made it worse.

John: But I remain hopeful that there is something out there that will change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the art form of ventriloquism.

Craig: I will say that it was refreshing to see a woman doing this as opposed to that weird Vegas-y, fake face, bad toupee type of dude.

John: OK.

Craig: You drive around Vegas, like impressions. I don’t understand impressions. Why is that cool? I don’t get it. It’s not that great.

John: Like Rich Little is not a person for you?

Craig: OK. You sound like those other people. But I could just – those other people are entertaining. That’s why you want to sound like them. But why don’t I just watch those other people. I get it. Anybody that does a Christopher Walken impression. Cool. You’ve made yourself like Christopher Walken. Which reminds me, I’m going to watch a Christopher Walken movie now. Impressions are also just like, meh, OK.

John: I remain hopeful that we will get you there at some point, Craig, and thank you for humoring me with the first installment of Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Oh, no problem. Yeah, I can’t wait for my mind to be changed. I like a good mind change. You know, my thing is all my opinions are strongly held but not firmly held.

John: Great. Good. All right. But let’s get to our feature topic, or one of our two feature topics. This is a Craig Mazin suggestion, so Craig start us off.

Craig: Well, you know, we’ve been doing all of our various segments, old and new lately, but my fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. So, it’s not with me as always any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.

It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say well how does the movie end. Usually people are talking about the climax and there’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax when things have settled down and there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.

I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there it will send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful it will send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is in a weird way the most important. So I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. So denouement is a French word. Denoue is to untie. To unknot something. And so it’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created. Sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel.

So as we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct Craig?

Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. Like for instance sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.

And in that sense you – I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say like, OK, what is the difference here. And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain. You’ve stopped the bomb. You win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing that’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself. You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test.

And at the end of the climax we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0. The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing but rather life has begun again. And this is the new person. This is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. So, in setting up your film you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Like will they be able to accomplish this thing. Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation. And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, OK, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says OK. We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together. They’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. So, they have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?

Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a kind of very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: So as we’re talking I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end and Manny’s final question is, “So, what are we doing for New Years?” So it’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before. That the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who is now born and saying like did all that really happen and the father says, “Yep, every word.” So essentially we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

So, they’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking the characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.

Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal and that’s something she does that’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s kind of helped her to see and that’s what he’s now learned from her. And the denouement which is important is to see, OK, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, look, it’s real. Right? She went to prison. But what’s happening? Well, Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is OK. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name.

And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. And it could have. She was a criminal. But it didn’t and that they’re going to go on and on. And then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie and it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is just the worse name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat and here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy, right?

But, both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. So, for instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, OK, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. So, if your problem is, OK, my character is Vanessa and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie. I apologize to Vanessa.

At the end I don’t necessarily – if she’s found love I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success. Because then I start to wonder, well, OK, what was the lesson here? Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. So one thing changes and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. So you’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about sort of like what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing we can carry our knowledge of sort of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out, right? Some songs have a big [Craig hums] and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade out. You know, he says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then, you know, two men just walk off and say, you know what, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is OK.

John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories, we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.

Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film and you’re watching Casablanca and for some reason the last ten minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say if you give me about two hours of your time I will make it worth your while. And you trust me and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started. And if you are not putting people back safely where they started they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people, well, reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes. And then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.

John: Well, OK, let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script I will generally jump forward and write the last ten pages. So some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.

Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last ten pages which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.

Craig: That just infuriates me. The very thought of it. Because I obsess over those, the way I obsess over the first ten. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I’m more of a kind of – you know, I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.

John: Probably so.

Craig: You know what I mean? I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way, creatively obviously inside the robot management. I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But I’m very kind of, you know, I’m a big planner.

John: I’m very instinctual and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.

Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.

John: All right. So let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because the denouements are about wrapping things up. So, the key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot but of theme, of relationship, of sort of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and sort of what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: I mean, that is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie they will in their minds add on the following words: And thus it shall always be. And if you have done it well, and thus it shall always be, it’ll be really comforting and wonderful for them.

By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. You know, I mean, honestly the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this [hums] and it’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, oh you know, our life is hard and tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.

At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say and thus it shall always be, meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better and thus it shall always be.

So, it doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be and sadly ever after. But the point is it will be thus. And it shall thus always be. So, if you think about it that way the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yeah. Everyone is sort of going to be frozen in that little capsule that you created there and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. So, that’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. So whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending that it feels like an ending.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Let’s transition to our real endings, which is basically our short time on this earth and at some point we will not be on this earth, but some of our work will still be around. And so I think this was a question from Pam Stucky on Twitter. I couldn’t find the actual tweet that sort of led to it. So if it’s not Pam, if it was somebody else, I’m sorry. But someone asked a smart question about like, well, have you guys ever talked about what happens to our work after we die? Or how stuff gets inherited? And I don’t think we really have.

So I wanted to dig into this a little bit and talk about two things. What happens legally to our work? And what happens creatively? What are the creative choices we might make about how we want to see our work passed down in the future? So some of the stuff is really straightforward and some of the stuff is a bigger discussion.

But legally you own copyright to the things you write. And that copyright is a real thing. It is an asset that can be passed along to your heirs. And if you don’t lay it out in your wills and other documents to describe where you want that copyright asset to go to, it will get passed along just like your comic book collection or your couch. So, it’s worth thinking about who you would like to own the rights to – the copyright to the stuff you make.

Copyright is worth a lot potentially for certain properties because it’s reproduction rights, it’s the ability to make more copies of that thing, so for a book. It’s distribution rights, who can sell and distribute your work. Performance rights, which is incredibly important for playwrights in particular. And adaptation rights. So, for authors it’s the ability to take that book you’ve written and turn it into a movie or turn into a TV show, or to remake it.

So, these are crucial things for the original works that you are creating. But, of course, as screenwriters so much of what we’re actually doing as our job isn’t original works. They are works for hire.

Craig: Right. And interestingly the term length is much different for individuals or for people commissioning works for hire. So in general we’re talking about anything that’s made since 1978, if you – John, you’ve written Arlo Finch. You are the copyright holder of Arlo Finch. The copyright protection lasts you how long?

John: My life plus a certain number of years, 75 years?

Craig: 70, yes, correct.

John: 70 years.

Craig: So, as long as you live and then the day you die a clock starts ticking and there are 70 more years for your daughter to gather up those delicious Arlo Finch royalties. At which point after that theoretically it goes into public domain the way that say the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are in public domain. And anybody can do anything they want with Sherlock Holmes.

But if there is a work-for-hire and that covers every time say Warner Bros. employs you or me to write a screenplay, the length of term there is 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of its creation. Now you can say well life of the author plus 70 could be more than that, but you know, typically people aren’t getting copyright to important works when they’re 10. So right now as you and I both approach 50 and maybe we’ve got another let’s say 30 years in there, they’re starting to even up.

And that number is going to get longer and longer because every time Mickey Mouse almost becomes public domain they seem to get an extension.

John: Yep. And so this will not be the episode where we actually talk about copyright systems and the weird ways it has been perverted to benefit – to really do the opposite of what copyright was supposed to do which was to get ideas out there in the public. But you could say, well, it doesn’t matter the things that I’m writing for Warner Bros. because I will never control copyright, therefore my heirs will get nothing. That is not true.

Craig: That is not true.

John: So, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was a movie I made for Warner Bros. that pays me residuals. Residuals are collected by the Writers Guild of America. And those residuals are based on every time they sell the movie through iTunes or license it to Netflix. I get checks. I get checks every quarter for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it’s quite valuable. Those checks will keep coming after I die. And that is a very good thing. And those checks will keep coming as long as that movie is worth something and it is being licensed under copyright. So as long as Warner Bros. has copyright on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie I’ve made, residuals will keep coming. And that is a good asset down the road.

Craig: Yeah. That’s basically the long and short of it right there. We do have a kind of perpetuous income source with the residuals. And that’s why we have residuals essentially to simulate royalties, to overcome the absurd fiction of the work-for-hire, which I guess is sometimes is not a fiction but a lot of times it is. So, yeah, that’s basically what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with 90 or 120 years following creation of or first publication, or first publication or creation of. That’s how long it lasts. So when we die it kind of doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t really care, in our case, because our death is not actually triggering any time constraint.

For you it will matter on Arlo Finch. Or interestingly for you and I have both written music for movies, so we’re in ASCAP and we get ASCAP royalties. Those I think will be tied to death and copyright and all that, the publishing.

John: They should be. Yeah. That’ll be interesting to see. And also it’s complicated because it’s comingled with people who did the music for it, so it’s me and Danny Elfman and I don’t really know how that all sorts out. I’ve choose not to worry about it. But, Craig, while I have you on this call I have a question about separated rights.

So, separated rights would also pass to an heir, correct?

Craig: I believe so. They pass to your estate.

John: Yes. So if you are a person who writes a work for which you receive separated rights, which is a complicated topic but essentially it’s the ability to derive money from sequels and other things based upon your original work that should pass along to your heirs. Sometimes there are even creative choices that come along with that. So that’s another useful thing.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, separated rights are at times tricky to invoke because the companies hate that they exist. But for instance if you write an original screenplay and sold the original screenplay you will maintain a separated right for dramatic exploitation under certain circumstances. In other words, you have the rights for a play to be done of the original script you wrote. And when you die that doesn’t go away. That stays with the family.

John: Yep. So quite famously J.F. Lawton who wrote Pretty Woman controlled the separated rights for Pretty Woman and did not want there to be a Broadway musical for a very, very long time. And could stop it. That separated rights is giving him that ability.

But let’s talk about sort of the creative aspect of this. Not the legal, but just sort of creatively what you might think about down the road. And so you may have specific intentions for how you want to see your work used in the future. A zillion years ago I worked on an adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time which was not the same thread of the current Wrinkle in Time. But Madeleine L’Engle had already passed away, but her estate had tremendous controls over what could be done with that property. So not just who could do it, but like specific things that had to be in the script or could not be in the script. They had creative controls. And that was given to her estate.

Edward Albee’s estate has sort of famously tangled with people who wanted to make casting changes to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

And I was talking to Andrew Lippa, my friend, about stuff he’s doing with the Dramatist Guild for playwrights and musical writers who want to be able to think about their works after they’ve passed away. And so there’s some things like basically a council of playwrights that will look at people’s intentions with plays at the time they were written and sort of how they should change down the road, so that after playwrights pass away there can be some consistency about sort of what kinds of things are done with a play. So it’s a fascinating topic creatively.

Craig: Again, for those of us in movies and television, not particularly applicable in that regard, other than the minor separated rights. But that ultimately comes down to your family or whomever you have assigned the executorship of your estate. Yeah, you know, I – it’s funny, I just don’t think much about this sort of thing. Probably because I don’t have any concern that I’m going to be watching either from heaven or from hell as people make bad decisions with the things I’ve done. I don’t think I’m going to be around.

John: A thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently though, and it probably started with Morrissey and Morrissey being a crank on Twitter. And I loved Morrissey’s songs, but now it’s like I don’t want – ugh, Morrissey shut up. And it got me thinking about whether I want to put some system in place where I would deputize three people of different generations and if they agreed that I needed to retire or basically move out of public view that I would have to take their decision. Basically a council of advisors who would say, no John, you need to stop. Because you look at people who have decided to step away and like maybe that was a great choice that they stepped away.

So Robert Redford recently announced that he’s retiring from acting. He’s not retiring as a public person, but he’s retired from acting. Daniel Day Lewis did it. Gene Hackman did it. And maybe there could be good cause for someone to give advice to somebody about this is the time to stop. Craig, what do you think about that?

Craig: I don’t think – the problem is if you become a crank then you’ll just say I’m not listening to these people anymore. Look, everybody has a moment where they should probably put it down, but then some people don’t. Some people go all the way to the end and you’re thankful for it, you know.

Look, it’s a personal decision. Sometimes these actors announce that they’re retiring from acting and I just think or just maybe retire from acting and not announce it. You know, stop. Just stop. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything to retire. That’s the beauty of retiring. An announcement that I’m no longer going to be doing – oh, do you need one last round of attention here? I think it’s more interesting when you discover that like people go, by the way, did you know that Gene Hackman apparently retired? That’s the best way to do it I think.

So when I finally retire – no one will care anyway.

John: Craig, do you think you will retire?

Craig: I think I will be retired. In other words, I hope that when I look at my own work and my mind and I have an assessment that it is of diminishing value that that will come either simultaneous with or slightly ahead of everybody else’s similar determination. The bummer is when everybody else figures out that you’ve lost it before you do. You don’t want to be that pitcher who is still going out there and getting shelled and guys are like, dude, you can’t throw a 95 anymore. You’re barely touching 90 and your stuff is flat. Maybe it’s time to hang up the spikes. No, I got one more season in me.

I don’t want to be that guy. But, you know, I keep a fairly careful eye on myself and I have a tendency towards self-loathing anyway, so I think I’ll be OK. I think if anything I will constantly try to retire and if people don’t want me to, or they need me to do something they’ll say, “No, no, no, not yet,” and then I’ll feel bad and do it. That’ll be the ideal situation.

John: You and I both know writers who sort of functionally got retired and they basically kind of stopped working. Like people stopped hiring them. And it is sad when they want to keep working and no one is hiring them. Ageism is a real thing in Hollywood. And this is the kind of insight in which if I actually went to therapy I probably could have had ten years ago, but a thing the last few weeks I’ve realized is that I think part of the reason I keep pursuing new things or stuff that I kind of don’t know anything about, like writing a book, writing a musical, software stuff, is that it’s nice to be the new person in something. It’s nice to feel like I am actually a beginner. That I’m a younger person in that field rather than sort of like the person who has been a screenwriter for 25 years.

Craig: Yeah.

John: There’s something nice about that. So I don’t know that I will ever retire, but I can also envision some point where I’m basically not writing movies anymore because I’m just doing other stuff, where I haven’t been doing it for 25 years.

Craig: No question. I mean, it’s just like video games are very difficult in the beginning when you’re weak and you’re confused and you’re not quite sure how the controls work and they’re a little scary. And then there’s that wonderful process of slowly and steadily mastering what’s happening, until you get to a point where you’re so powerful it’s boring. And the more you do something, even if it’s not in terms of power it’s just in terms of mastery, it can get – like I don’t really want necessarily to write rated-R comedies anymore, because I feel like I’ve done it a lot. And I’m a little bit bored.

And it’s not even to say that I’ve done it well, or that I couldn’t do it better. But there’s been a lot of it. And there’s been a lot that people haven’t seen, also, where my name is not there, but there’s more work than people know. And so I agree with you that changing things up and trying new things is delightful. I’m 100% in that place with you.

I think sometimes with some of the people who get retired, forcibly retired, ageism, yes, I think truly is a thing. However, Ted Eliot did point out something many years ago that had the ring of strong truth to it, which was that there are people that kind of happen in Hollywood. They make a big splash with a thing. And it’s a shiny thing and people get excited and they begin hiring that person. And slowly but surely as they go from project to project to project the word spreads that maybe they’re actually just not that good. And that some of these people aren’t aging out, they’re just being found out.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they just weren’t as good as people thought. And there’s been a bunch of those. Also some people behave poorly and they get retired out because all things being equal people would rather work with somebody that’s nice than not nice. Especially these days I think that’s more of a consideration than it used to be.

But, yeah, it’s a tough thing because the market is cruel, but not irrational necessarily. Racist though. It’s definitely racist. See that one there’s no question about.

John: Yeah, there’s a little of that. So a thing I found is at a certain point you become – when you first start in this business you are younger than the people hiring you, and then you end up becoming about the same age as the people hiring you, and then you become older than some of the people hiring you. And at a certain point it becomes challenging to take instructions from people who have less experience than you do. And that I think is probably true in all industries across the board. It is weird to be working for somebody younger than you. That is naturally a part of it.

But I think another thing that happens is that sometimes if this executive is used to working with young writers who will do 50,000 drafts and keep smiling and will try to incorporate all the bad ideas because they’re hungry and desperate for a job, the fact that the more experienced writer isn’t so hungry will change the nature of that relationship. You know, if a writer says, you know what, I’m not going to try to implement that ridiculous note that won’t conceivably work because it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

That’s a thing that the older writer might say that the younger writer wouldn’t say and ultimately that older writer I think gets hired less and less.

Craig: Yeah, you know, I have found that there’s been a nice shift in a weird way. I was – I think it’s different for everybody. Honestly it’s just the way you carry yourself and how you are. I think some people as they get older they just don’t refresh their minds about the world around them and I try and do that as best I can.

Having children helps. You know, having a 17-year-old and a 13-year-old makes it so that I have a certain amount of awareness of what’s going on around me. Also there’s a little bit of a sweet spot which I think you and I are probably in right now. It’s as you’re approaching 50. My guess is it’s your 50s where you’re not too old, but you are old enough where it seems like you’re kind of the vet. Like you know, like you’re a reliable vet who is going to get the job done. Thank god you’re here. I want somebody slightly older than me who I feel like I can listen to. And you’re not too old so you’re not grandpa.

That’s a real thing. I think that you and I have the best possible insurance against ageism ever which is this show. Since by the time we’re in our 60s every single person running every studio I believe will have grown up listening to this podcast. Therefore we should be fine. You and I will be OK forever.

John: As long as the council that we’ve appointed to tell us that we need to stop doing the show doesn’t tell us we need to stop doing the show.

Craig: I’m already saying no to them. I defy them.

John: I refuse!

Craig: I refuse.

John: Let’s wrap this segment up with just a little bit of practical advice. If you are thinking about sort of who should control your work after you pass away, at a certain point you’re going to need to make a will. So every screenwriter at a certain point wakes up in panic and says like, oh crap, I have no will, I have no estate, I have nothing planned. You go to a lawyer and do it.

I think if you’re young and starting out without a lot of assets you can probably do one of those online things or get a book or do something that way and just write the will, do whatever you’re supposed to do in the State of California. File it wherever you’re supposed to file it so it’s found after your death. And make those choices about where those things are supposed to go.

If you are a person with some substantial assets you do need to go find a person who can figure out how you should structure all the stuff, because at a certain point you’re going to put stuff into a trust and there’s reasons why you do things the way you do them. But it’s worth everyone thinking about so you have some sense of where you would like your work to go.

Craig: 100%. I believe you and I use the same guy.

John: Yep. He’s the guy. All of our friends do use the same guy.

Craig: There you go. Boy, I hope that guy is good or else we’re all–

John: Just toast. It turns out he’s just awful and made fundamental misassumptions.

All right, let us go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing are actually two awesome women who both write and perform. The first is my friend Erin Gibson. So Erin Gibson, she’s the host or cohost of Throwing Shade podcast which is fantastic. Co-creator, writer, and director of Gay of Thrones, which I’m sure you’ve watched. Jonathan Martin sort of recaps of Game of Thrones. They are fantastic.

But she has a book out which is also great. I went to the party. The book came out today but it’s already gotten great reviews. Called Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death. And it’s great. And Erin is fantastic. But she’s one of those people who – this is how I first met Erin Gibson.

She and Bryan Safi, who are cohosts on Throwing Shade, were both correspondents on this show called Infomania on the Current Network. And I stumbled across this show. I thought they were singularly fantastic. This is pre-Twitter I guess, so I emailed them and said like you guys are both fantastic and we ended up having coffee and they’ve been friends since then. So, Erin Gibson, a fantastic writer and performer.

The second one is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And sometimes in life you find little individual things you like and then later on realize they were all the same thing. And that was Phoebe Waller-Bridge for me. So, she is the writer-creator of Killing Eve, which is remarkable. It’s so good. You should watch it. But before that she did Fleabag, which I hadn’t seen, but now I’m watching and it’s great. And she stars in and wrote that. And then she was also L3-37, the robot in Solo, which was one of my favorite things about that movie. And so she was all of these things and is all one person. And so I’m so happy that there’s a Phoebe Waller-Bridge out there. So, Erin Gibson, Phoebe Waller-Bridge are my two great One Cool Things.

Craig: Wow. That is pretty cool. I love it when that happens. And that is a bit of a sign from the universe that you should be friends with somebody, isn’t it?

John: Probably so. So, she should probably come on the show next time she’s in Los Angeles.

Craig: Yeah. Seems like that should happen.

Well, just like your two things, my third thing is also a video game DLC. What? OK. So, I’ve been playing The Witcher 3.

John: I don’t like The Witcher. So tell me why you love it.

Craig: Well, I don’t love it. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t love it. I like it. I did not like it to start with. It took a little bit of time to get into. And then once I got into it I was like, OK, OK, it’s pretty cool in that it’s massive. It’s sort of like do you like Skyrim? Well, what if it was Skyrim but not as good but bigger, like there was more stuff to do.

So many quests, you’ll never finish them. But, you know, not bad. Terrible video game sex in it. I don’t think I’ve seen good video game sex.

John: Terrible in what way?

Craig: The mouths don’t touch. And the hips are moving incorrectly, so it is a hideous simulacrum of sex. It’s just incredibly not arousing. The breasts do not move. They will show bare female breasts but they have no jiggle, so it’s like that’s not right. That’s really not right at all. Yeah, video game sex not sexy.

Also, this game, Witcher, from 2015 just absurdly sexist in a way that I think like I can only assume that the people over there in Poland at Project Red who are no doubt hard at work on Witcher 4 have noticed the world has changed. I hope they have. And maybe some of their women could have shirts that close. You know, that would be nice if all the buttons went up to the neck. Just a thought.

Yeah, anyway.

John: So, I mean, Witcher 3 is really, I mean, I played it back when I was in Paris. And it is beautiful. It really does look terrific and looks better than Skyrim kind of does. But you’re always playing the one guy and I felt like I was on rails the entire time. So I probably only played like two hours into it and just gave up.

Craig: The first two hours you are on rails. And when they take you off the rails, that’s the weird part, is that the first part of the game is absurdly railed and then once that’s over they’re like, no rails. Also, you have 4,000 quests to do. Good luck, bye. And then it really is fun. And never-ending. So you probably quit just a little too early. But I will say that in terms of the beauty aspect of it I got this DLC Blood and Wine where you go this new region which is essentially French wine countryside.

John: Nice.

Craig: And it is gorgeous. Oh, it’s so great to look at. I mean, the gameplay is the same damn thing, but it is beautiful. And you get your own vineyard estate to renovate. You have your own major domo who is very nice. You have nice chats with him.

You know, I’m not a big craft your own home guy, but when I did, like in Fallout 4 I’m like, OK, I better sort of spiff up my little homestead here you know. But the guess you can do is use terrible post-apocalyptic materials to build your weird creepy hut. Here you’re living in this gorgeous French, you know, countryside manor with fields and Bougainvillea and it’s quite lovely.

So, anyway, Witcher 3: Blood and Wine if you feel like escaping slightly to your French countryside estate while you are slaughtering Necrophages with your silver sword. There you go.

John: All right. And that is our show for this week. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. And special thanks to Luke Davis for sending us that cool intro bit with Craig.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: If you have an outro or intro thing you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions and bits of follow up like we discussed today.

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, anywhere where podcasts are found. Leave us a review. That’s always great. Links to stuff we talked about in today’s episode will be in the show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We have nearly 3,000 of you premium subscribers. And so I think after we wrap here I’m going to talk to Craig about a special little thing I kind of want to do for those premium subscribers, because that’s pretty cool.

Craig: That’s amazing.

John: All right, Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John. I will see you next week.

Links:

• You can listen to John & Craig on another podcast: Jordan, Jesse, Go!
• You can check out our episode with Mindy Kaling, or our episode with Susanna Fogel and David Iserson for some context in this week’s follow-up.
• John’s attempt at “Changing Craig’s Mind” about ventriloquism: Nina Conti
• Edward Albee’s estate has special rules about casting for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
• Erin Gibson: Throwing Shade podcast, Gay of Thrones, and her new book, Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death.
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge: Killing Eve, Fleabag, and she’s the robot, L3-37, in Solo
• The Witcher 3: Blood And Wine DLC
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!). And thank you, Luke Davis, for Craig’s musical intro!

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 364 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today Craig is off in Chernobyl land in a hotel that from his descriptions sounds like Eastern Europe’s equivalent of the Overlook, so he is my Daniel Lloyd, I am his Dick Halloran, except instead of The Shining we have spotty text messaging. Assuming he escapes the hedge maze he will be back next week.

In the meantime, I am lucky to have a special guest. Kate Hagen is Director of Community, is that correct?

**Kate Hagen:** That’s right, yeah.

**John:** At the Black List. I want to talk to her about what that means, but mostly I want to talk to her about her blog post about the state of home video, video stores, and the many movies that are weirdly unavailable. Kate, welcome.

**Kate:** Thanks so much for having me, John. This is a pleasure to be able to be on the much-loved Scriptnotes.

**John:** And so I’d seen your blog post, the one that kicked this all off about the last great video store months ago. And I had always bookmarked it. It was going to be a One Cool Thing, but it felt too big to be a One Cool Thing because I actually wanted to talk about it. And it sort of slipped down in my feed of stuff to discuss. And in the past two weeks I had trouble trying to find a copy of The Flamingo Kid, and it all surfaced up again. So, I was encountering what you had encountered. What was the movie that you were trying to look for?

**Kate:** I was trying to look for a movie called Fresh Horses, which is most notable for being the only reteaming of Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Ringwald after Pretty in Pink. It’s not a good movie, it’s just one of those ‘80s curiosities that I was like, “Oh, I’d like to see this again.” And I started looking for it one night and the only version I could find was on like a very illegal website where it was dubbed in Polish. And I was like well that’s pretty nuts. This movie is 30 years old. Ben Stiller and Viggo Mortensen are also in it, so it’s not like a nobodies’ movie. And the only way you can get Fresh Horses currently is in one of those six-movie ‘80s collections on Amazon, which is a bummer, because then it’s just like a crappy version of the movie.

**John:** Cool. So let’s try to figure out and solve all the problems of missing home videos in the next hour.

**Kate:** I think we can do it.

**John:** But we’ll start with simpler things which you can explain what you actually do at the Black List.

**Kate:** Yeah. So my fun answer for this is I am like the ultimate Internet team for the Black List. So I’m kind of the online mom of the Black List. I make sure all of our online community is healthy and getting along with each other. That includes everything from doing all of our social media, to editing and curating our blog, to overseeing customer support. I run point on all of our site partnerships. So, Franklin likes to put it that Megan and I – Megan is our director of events – and she kind of handles everything that is an in-person interaction and I handle everything that’s an online interaction.

**John:** So Franklin Leonard launched the Black List as a site shortly after one of the Austin Film Festival appearances. So he came on the show, on a live show, to talk about this plan he had for the Black List and it’s been fascinating to watch it grow into this big thing that it is right now.

So, you are part of a small team, and so as people are submitting scripts that they want to show up on the site for coverage and for other things for professionals to look at them, you are part of the team that interacts with those folks?

**Kate:** Yeah. So like day-to-day I’m just keeping an eye on everything that’s coming through the website in terms of evaluations, if there are any issues with any scripts or anything. I’m kind of just the keeper of all of that stuff. And, you know, making sure people can opt into partnerships, all that kind of good stuff.

**John:** Now at this point are you still reading scripts that come in, or are your days as a reader behind you?

**Kate:** My days as a reader are behind me. I was a reader – it was my full-time gig for about eight months, but I was doing freelance for about a year and a half. And I covered about 500 scripts in that time. Yeah, and there are definitely days when I miss being a reader. I mean, there are other days where I’m super glad I don’t have to do that anymore. But like friends will reach out to give notes on their scripts and I’m like, “Oh, I really like doing this,” the kind of page notes where you have a good relationship with someone and you can be like this is not working and they’re not going to get mad at you, as opposed to just sending coverage off into the void.

**John:** Weirdly over the course of all these episodes of Scriptnotes I don’t think we’ve talked that much about the job of a reader, sort of what it’s like to be a reader. So, my first jobs in Hollywood were as a reader. I started as a reader covering scripts for Prelude Pictures, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was this tiny little company based over at Paramount. And every week I’d go in, they’d give me two scripts. I would write up my coverage on these two scripts, then come back in, deliver those, and pick up new scripts. This was back in the day when there weren’t PDFs, so you were actually physically picking up scripts and reading them and writing up your coverage, and printing them out and sending them back in.

I assume this is all happening digitally these days?

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s all happening digitally at least as far as the Black List is concerned. People just upload their scripts to the site. The readers are then able to access those scripts, and they provide an evaluation. And our coverage is a little bit different than traditional coverage. It’s meant to be kind of a high level notes for the writer. It’s not getting into like page-by-page details some of the time. Although some readers choose to do that. It’s more focused on what’s working in the script, what’s not working in the script, and what the likely audience for that might be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a very different relationship to the writer than coverage traditionally is. Because coverage classically what I was doing for Prelude, then I was a reader at TriStar, you’re really just a gatekeeper in that function. Basically a script comes in, the executive doesn’t have time to read it, so you are basically writing a book report, a summary of what happens in the script and your overall reaction to the script. Sometimes it’s a page and a half of summary and then one page of comments talking through characters, plot, sort of overall impressions of “Is this a good writer?” a recommendation – like consider this script, consider this writer, consider both. And generally the answer is consider neither for most–

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the function is basically to say no to everything.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s so funny. So before I was reading for the Black List I was reading freelance for Bold Films. And I read probably I’d say about 100 scripts for them in that period of time. And the only two things I ever recommended were Arrival and Dark Places, the script for that. But, yeah, I think most people don’t realize that as a reader and a gatekeeper you need to be passing on 95% of stuff. It’s very rare that you get anything that kind of emerges from the pile.

But I would have moments, too, where like it would be a very talented writer who was given like not a great book to adapt or something. And it was nice to be able to be like, “Hey, this writer is really great, even if this material is not working.” And I do think that’s something that like we don’t focus on enough in evaluating scripts. It’s all about the script itself, and obviously you have to execute a script, but it would be nice sometimes if we directed some of that love back to the writer if they’re doing a good job.

**John:** Definitely. Sometimes the function of a reader is you’re looking for a specific thing that this company can make, and so if something doesn’t fall into the purview of what this company would make you’re going to pass on it because you don’t want to waste the executive’s time reading this thing that they can’t actually do. But along the way you sometimes will read good writing and in my time reading for TriStar I read 200 scripts. I still have a list of all that coverage. And none of the things I read ended up getting made. Two of the things I ended up recommending I sort of got called to the mat for wasting people’s time for recommending them. It’s so frustrating.

**Kate:** And taste is so crazy. You know, there’s a sort of consensus I feel like in terms of what’s good in Hollywood, but then you get a lot of outliers and it depends on people’s bosses and all that kind of good stuff. And like you were saying in terms of what a given company can make within a calendar year, or couple of calendar years. Yeah, so it’s a tricky gig.

I think a lot of screenwriters have this kind of attitude about readers that like they’re trying to pull one over on them. And it’s like, no guys, we just want to read good scripts. Like that’s all we ever want to do. And I’m sorry that most scripts are not good. It’s a bummer. I would love to recommend scripts all the time.

**John:** And I think another thing people don’t understand is that most readers are writers, or at least a sizable portion of readers are actually screenwriters themselves. And it’s a very classic first job in Hollywood is to be one of those readers. If someone wants to be a reader, I mean, the Black List is a sort of a special case, but in general how are people getting hired as readers these days?

**Kate:** Yeah, I mean, this is a tricky question. I have a number of friends who are still reading and I think a lot of it like everything in life and especially in this business is relationship-based.

It was funny, when I graduated college there was this idea of like you move to Los Angeles and you went to film school for screenwriting and you’ll get a reader job like that. It’ll be no problem. You’ll be able to support yourself. Those days are long past. So most folks I know are either reading for multiple companies or reading is just one of the many things they do.

But I think a lot of that is based on your relationships with assistants, with executives, finding folks that like even if your taste is not the same it’s in the same ballpark so that you know that like even if we disagree about a script we can argue both sides of this to come to some sort of agreement on whether or not we’re going to recommend it.

**John:** When someone is being hired as a reader there’s usually sample coverage that they’re looking at. So, you will have written up coverage on a script, and even if they haven’t read the script that it’s based on you get a sense of like this person can evaluate story. This person can summarize things well enough so I can understand what the plot of a script is.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the biggest challenges I always had as a reader is you read a script and you’re trying to write the summary and how do you even summarize this thing. The story makes no sense. And sometimes, in the course of writing the synopsis, I’m kind of inventing – in the simplification of it I’m trying to create story so there is a narrative thread to go through there.

**Kate:** Ugh, that was always a challenge. I remember one time I got a script where I believe it was four different versions of the protagonist and the way that this was denoted in the script was different levels of gray scale to tell you which version of the protagonist was interacting within which scene. And you’re like I don’t know what the medium gray is after 30 pages. What am I supposed to do to keep up with that? It can be a real challenge sometimes to just even, you know, pick your way through the narrative and like you said try to find some kind of cohesive narrative thread.

**John:** Are most readers still in Los Angeles or with the rise of the Internet are they just spread out throughout the country?

**Kate:** Speaking for the Black List, we have folks who read all over America and some folks throughout other parts of the world. But most folks I know who are reading as any kind of full-time or steady gig are here, because they have other aspirations in the industry and reading is just a part of that.

**John:** And when they say they’re doing it as a full-time gig or a steady gig, is it still a per-script basis where you’re getting paid per unit? You’re getting X dollars for reading a script?

**Kate:** Yeah. I’ve always heard rumors of these fabled studio readers, WGA readers. I have never met one in the flesh. I don’t know if that’s just something that used to exist and no longer exists. But I only ever got paid for script coverage on a by-script basis. I never got any kind of like weekly fee or anything.

**John:** And what are the ranges you’re hearing about in Los Angeles these days?

**Kate:** It really depends. I have gotten paid everything from $10 to $300 to evaluate a single script. So there’s a wide range. I would say most folks’ going rate for kind of a script evaluation is in the $40 to $50 range. I think especially there’s so many folks reading and because the Internet exists and because we’re all on electronic devices anyway all the time it’s a little easier to read a script then like when you were talking about, you know, got to go to the office, got to pick up the paper copies. The fact that you can do it remotely.

So there are definitely some factors I think that have dropped the price a little bit. But I would love to see a world in which reading was like a legitimate full-time gig for many people that had its own union and all that fun stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s horrifying that you say it’s $40 to $50 because that’s – I was getting $50 to $65 20 years ago reading at TriStar.

**Kate:** It’s hard out there. When I was reading full-time I was usually reading two or three scripts a day, depending. And then I know some folks who have been doing it for ten years and can do five or six scripts a day. I would occasionally do four scripts a day, but at that point you’re like I have no brain function left at all.

**John:** And reading that many scripts does just burn a hole in your brain. I feel like at a certain point – it was good, like the first 100 or 200 it was very helpful for me as a writer being able to understand what kind of never worked on a page, and also what my personal taste – I never want to write that kind of way because I sort of feel what happens when you try to do that thing. But it ultimately is using some of the same parts of your brain you need as a writer. You’re visualizing all these things. And it can be really sad.

**Kate:** Yeah. But I mean, it’s also super instructive. I highly recommend that most folks, even if you’re not doing it in a professional capacity, even if you can go on a screenwriting forum and pull a bunch of amateur scripts or something just to give yourself the challenge of writing coverage. Because nothing will teach you more about what not to do as a screenwriter then reading a bunch of really bad scripts.

**John:** That’s actually a great idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever do it as a feature, but it would be interesting to take a script and have people just go off and write coverage for it and be able to cover the coverage and sort of see what people are–

**Kate:** Right before I got hired for Black List I was in consideration for another job for a small production company. And it was down to me and one other person to be the kind of assistant executive catch-all role. And they gave us both the same script and they said one of the execs likes this script and one of the execs doesn’t like this script. And we are going to hire based on your coverage.

The script was just this very boring, middle-of-the-road white guy coming of age sexual fantasy. And I told them about it. And I did not get that job. But I was like, “Well, I guess I didn’t want this job anyway because our taste was not going to align.”

**John:** Well let’s transition now to talking about video, because your piece which was great when I read it, as I go back and reread it now it’s like, oh, she actually answers some of the questions that I had sort of in my head about the availability of movies and sort of our misperception of how big some of these video stores really were in the day and where we’re at right now.

And I also want to get into sort of the difference between streaming and online download and stuff like that because they’re similar but they’re not quite the same thing. And even in your piece, I realized today as I was reading through it again, you did have some answers for sort of why some of these movies are missing and there are sort of big structural issues that need to be tackled to get into it.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of issues that keep movies off streaming, off home video. A couple of the big ones, the one that’s most compelling to me is music rights. I’m also a huge music person, so the idea that films can’t be put on home video with their original music intact is just absolutely sacrilegious to me. But at the same time, you know, that’s one of the few ways you can still make money off music anymore is by licensing it to a film. So, like my friend Marc Heuck who is quoted in the piece talks about, it’s much cheaper for most studios to just do nothing with these titles rather than relicense the music and put it out in some kind of official home video release or get it back on streaming.

And that’s a huge bummer. There are so many movies for which the soundtrack is an essential part of them and the idea that that’s what’s keeping them out of the public sphere is a huge bummer.

I would say for a lot of the ‘90s indies it’s really interesting. A lot of those production companies have since folded and like even the parent companies have folded. So then it becomes a chain of title situation of like do the rights revert back to the producer, the director. Who ended up with the rights to these films? And most of the time you can’t see your way through the darkness and so it’s very difficult to get those films on streaming. But, you know, these movies are 25 years old and all of a sudden unavailable and you’re like, guys, this is going to be like a second silent era kind of erasure if we’re not careful.

**John:** So, before we get into fixing the problem, let’s talk about the scope of the problem. I think most people’s perception is that when Netflix by Mail existed that kind of solved the problem. It seemed like it solved the problem because any movie you could possibly imagine, oh well, it was available on Netflix by Mail before it was even “By Mail” back then. That sense where they would send you a little disc in a red envelope and it would come and show up.

Obviously it was a solution only for movies that existed on home video. It was only for movies in North America. Obviously we’re in a global world, but right now we’re just focusing on what happens in the US and Canada. But for a while it seemed really good and it was very hard to think of a movie that you’d want to see that wasn’t available sort of through Netflix.

As Netflix moves to streaming, I think most of us, myself included, just sort of assumed that well obviously they’re not going to be able to have all the same kind of content there, but it’s just bits. So it sits on a server someplace and if one person a month wants to watch that movie, great, it’s going to be available for them to watch. That’s not at all what happened.

So, in your piece you talk about Netflix at the time of your writing has about 3,686 films available for streaming at any point. But even like a Blockbuster back in the day could have 10,000.

**Kate:** That was a really mind-blowing stat to me. I would have never guessed that my local Blockbuster was stocking 10,000 movies and then putting that next to the Netflix number you’re like, “Wait a minute, so we just get like drama, children’s, and comedy.” And so much of the Netflix content is original and from the last ten years. I mean, that’s a whole different conversation, too, the idea of classic films that are kept off of streaming. I mean, Netflix only has 100 movies on the service from 1900 to 1990, which is absolutely insane.

**John:** And so we can’t rely on Netflix to be the solution to all the problems and obviously Amazon Video has their own streaming services, but Amazon and iTunes/Apple they also offer the ability to rent or to purchase these movies. And I guess I assumed that that was going to be the other solution, because it feels like once a movie is available for purchase or for rental through those sites it can sort of just be permanently there. And at least in your article I can’t find a listing of sort of how many movies are available for rental or purchase on iTunes or through Amazon.

**Kate:** iTunes I have not also been able to figure out. Amazon you can look at through Just Watch, which is the website I used for much of the piece. And that will list everything that’s available for rental. But you know the way I think about that is particularly like I’m thinking about this a lot in terms of the young film fan, kids, teenagers who are just getting into movies. You know, if you’re 14 are you going to watch the free movie on Netflix or are you going to go to your parents and be like “Can I have the credit card, can I do the $3 movie purchase?” No, you’re going to pick the free stuff or you’re not going to watch anything or you’re going to watch YouTube clips. And, you know, I will gladly pay $2 or $3 to rent something on Amazon or iTunes or whatever, but you know, that’s still not fixing the problem that’s still gatekeeping in a way.

My friend, Kate Barr, at Scarecrow in Seattle said the most interesting thing about Amazon and Netflix in particular and she was talking about this idea that for her it’s a First Amendment issue that, you know, when home video began it was suddenly freedom of choice for people in a way that they had never had before. You could pick exactly what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it. And in a weird way we’ve come full circle to like limiting our choices again. Like we went from having so many choices to not as many choices, even though it seems like streaming is more accessible.

**John:** Yeah. So I’ll push back a little bit on some of that stuff. I mean, First Amendment, it’s not government control, but it is that access, that sense of I need to be able to access culture and I am being denied the ability to see that thing of culture because of weird corporate restrictions. I think what is so great about the piece you did on Scarecrow Video, so we’re going to link to your main article, but you have done great follow-ups at other video stores and talking to the folks who run these video stores, many of which have become non-profits because they’re really about access to these movies rather than trying to earn a buck.

I would say that we can have this sort of golden age idea of like, “Oh, I could get to all those movies because I could go to Scarecrow Video or I could go to these places and all those movies were there,” but that relied on your ability to actually get to those places.

**Kate:** Sure.

**John:** And so for kids who grew up in rural Iowa there was no video store, so they were completely dependent on what would show up on TV or what was available at their little small tiny video store. I guess what’s surprising is even those small video stores had more than I think we sort of remember them having.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, I would say two things about that. I think something that became really apparent to me in writing this piece was how much I had undervalued and I think how much most of us undervalued the video store as a living library archive, as just kind of a history of record. Because, you know, it doesn’t matter what the quality of a movie is, you know, for new releases most video stores are buying all new releases every week. When you start doing that you start to build up a pretty robust collection of stuff and that also kind of catches movies that might slip through the cracks otherwise. And nobody really thinks about that when they think about video store erasure. Like I think about some of the great video stores have closed and it’s like what happens to all these movies when they do close?

I would also – I have not figured out a way to zero in on this, but you were talking about the idea of what was available to folks on television, like to me that is something that has significantly shrunk, too, the kinds of movies we show on TV. Like when I was a kid I watched a ton of weird stuff on IFC and Sundance and movies like Kissed that have never even been put on DVD. And to me now cable is about 250 movies that we have decided we’re going to show and that’s it. And I don’t know if that’s also a licensing issue and with streaming, but to me that’s a huge pool that shrunk, too, and it’s much harder to stumble upon something on cable.

It’s just like, hey guess what, it’s Ghostbusters or Pulp Fiction again.

**John:** Yep. So you talk about video stores used to be kind of the movie libraries of a community, and so obviously one solution to that is the actual library. Andrew in LA wrote in based on what we talked about last week saying, “A couple years ago I discovered what a great resource the LA Public Library is for movies that were otherwise unavailable online. I was one of the first holdouts with the Netflix DVD subscription so I could have access to older, more obscure stuff, but I found that the library had all that was on Netflix and more. The Flamingo Kid is no exception. Just a suggestion for next time you run into that issue.”

**Kate:** Yeah. When I was a kid we rented from the library I would say maybe about a third as much as we rented from Blockbuster. All I had as a kid was Blockbuster, so that’s where we went. But, yeah, the library is an incredible resource. Also I know there are certain library subscriptions where like they will put the catalog online so with your library card you can then stream titles which is really cool.

But, yeah, these kind of creative solutions to working around the streaming bubble. I think people don’t realize there are still – at least when I wrote the piece – there are still at least 90,000 DVDS that one can rent from Netflix online, which is pretty nuts. Part of me has wondered if I should go back to disc Netflix, which is like a very weird thing to do in the Year of our Lord 2018. And, you know, those DVD subscriptions are still playing quite a bit of Netflix’s overall budget for the year. So, people are still doing it. People still want access to more films than what is at the streaming service at any given time.

**John:** As a WGA board member I also have to bring up the issue that while the ability to get to those discs is fantastic for people who want to watch those movies, those discs that are sitting at the LA Public Library that were sitting at Blockbuster, they earn nothing for the writer. So figuring out how to make this available for streaming, for rental, for purchase online is actually very meaningful to any writer, director, actor who is relying on residuals from these movies, because if you were to go stream Charlie’s Angels I get paid for that. If you go find a DVD, you get it from Redbox or you get it from the library, I don’t get paid for that. So it’s worth solving on many fronts and not just sort of like getting access to those physical things again.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s something definitely to think about. This is something like I was talking a little bit about the ‘90s titles. For all of those creative teams, and like that’s so unfair to them that just because the company who put it out folded that they now have no ownership over this title anymore. And those rights should, you know, of course there are legal – all that kind of stuff you have to go through and hoops, but the chain of title on that stuff should revert back to the creators at some point if there is kind of no powers that be left.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about the legal teams involved here, because as you look at classic film preservation, so there’s the kinds of movies that are in the danger of being lost to history because the only print was in a vault someplace and it’s falling apart, and so we have these really smart chemists and colorists who go through and they save these movies and then we do a giant projection, 70mm, and everyone cheers because this movie has been saved.

For every one of those movies there’s thousands that are not being saved because they only exist on VHS or they sort of never really came out on video. And those are the movies that we need to be able to salvage. And it’s not that there’s no copy of them available, there’s just no legal copy of them available. There’s no way to actually get to it. And I kind of feel like we need that band of lawyers and sort of paralegals and other folks who can just figure out the copyright on the stuff and get those things out there the same way we have the chemists and the colorists saving those big prints, just so that we don’t lose this kind of culture.

You talk about sort of a silent moment, especially movies in the ‘70s, ‘80s, early ‘90s that are in real danger of just being lost because they are unavailable. There’s no place to find them.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean to say nothing of all of the kind of home video ephemera that arose as a part of that whole movement, you know, where you’d get trailer compilations or a behind-the-scenes documentary, or cartoon compilations. All of that kind of stuff has also vanished. And, you know, most streaming services aren’t offering those kind of special features, bonus features, and that’s as much of a content apocalypse as the movies themselves, like just getting rid of all of the kind of additional materials that were attached to that.

**John:** So, overall goals. We talk about film preservation and film history, sort of the chemists who are making those prints actually work. We talk about the archivists and sort of the film buff, but also the film student. And so those folks are going to be able to find that collection of animated shorts. If someone is willing to put in five hours to sort of discover this place and to drive to that place and find that one copy of something, she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. At least for now she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. But I think your point about the kid who is used to just being able to get everything online immediately is not going to seek that stuff out and there’s a whole bunch of culture that’s going to be lost because that kid is not going to have any way to sort of find it.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean I have this argument with folks all the time of like, you know, “Well kids are curious. They’ll figure it out on their own.” I’m like, no, not if they don’t have the tools. Not if they’ve never been to a video store before and not if they’ve never used a library archive system to like truly dig for something. Most of us have lizard brain. Like we just want instant gratification, whatever is easiest. And, you know, as these things become more and more challenging to find and there are other distractions it becomes easier to just be like, “I’ll get to that later.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. So things are holding these movies off, and Marc Edward Heuck had a really good point that you mentioned in your blog post about music rights. And so this really makes sense, because as a person who has made movies when you are putting a song in a movie, you’re putting a piece of existing music in a movie, you are buying sync rights and mechanical rights which are the ability to include that song on a soundtrack of your film.

And along with that you might say like this is for theatrical distribution, so this if for a certain number of years of home video. And you may no longer have the ability to have that song in your movie, which is really a challenge when it comes time to actually try to release that movie again on home video. If you don’t control the rights of the thing that’s in there, either you can’t do it yourself, or you can’t sell it to somebody who would put it out on home video because they worry about getting sued.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** Have you talked to anybody who has been through this situation or do you have any sense of how you sort this out?

**Kate:** That’s a great question. I know that there have been some films released with alternate soundtracks in the last couple of years, or put on streaming with alternate soundtracks. And, you know, is that better than not being able to see the film at all? Yes. Is it a bummer that you can’t see the movie as it was originally made? Absolutely. I would love to get more of a pulse on the whole music rights situation because so many of my favorite films, like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, it’s like you strip the music from that there is no movie. And like that’s a DVD that’s out of print. It was in print for a couple of years and now is like $50 on the used market.

Yeah, but I am not entirely sure what can be done to kind of rectify that because that’s also a problem with the record industry and the way online availability of music kind of tanked the entire record industry. And you’re like, “Oh, but we can get some pennies out of relicensing this for movies or television.” So I understand where the record companies are coming from. But also it feels like there needs to be a more reasonable solution for both parties.

**John:** Well also it feels like it’s very much targeting the movies that set us off, which is the early ‘80s movies which would have had pop songs of the time and things could just be complicated. Those were also companies that were bought and sold multiple times. The Flamingo Kid was MGM, but like who knows – MGM has been so many different things over the years. That entire catalog has come and gone a zillion times.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s wild when you think about all the tiny production shingles that have since folded and then, you know, just what happens to these movies when that company no longer exists. Yeah, like Little Darlings is another big one for me that’s really hard to find and that’s got a bunch of very expensive music cues. There’s a John Lennon song in it. And that has been broadcast once on TCM like several years ago and that’s the only way you can see that movie if you can’t find a VHS tape, which is a huge bummer.

**John:** Marc’s piece also talks about The Heartbreak Kid, Stepford Wives, and Sleuth, which basically were made by a secondary studio. They were made by a smaller company, and so a bigger company buys them out and really has no interest in putting those movies out because it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be profitable for them to put them out. They want those titles because they can be remade. And so they want them for the remake rights, not for the actual underlying thing itself.

And I don’t know how you pressure them to actually do anything. And I do wonder if there is some legislation, some sort of bigger movement to get these titles sort of set free. The challenge is who pushes that? The copyright holders have a vested interest in not changing anything. And so it’s going to have to be filmmakers who sort of insist that their early works be released into the public sphere. It’s the kind of thing where in France it would be actually easier for those filmmakers to probably get stuff to happen than it is here.

**Kate:** Yeah. Something really interesting that happened, so Dilcia Barrera, a programmer at LACMA, reached out to me after the piece and was like would you like to show Fresh Horses at LACMA? And I was like absolutely. So, Sony did not have a functional print of Fresh Horses, so they struck a brand new beautiful 35mm print for the screening. And now there’s a chance that it might be put out on Blu-Ray because this new print was struck. So I think that’s an interesting piece to consider, you know, if you demand these movies theatrically and that kind of forces the hand of companies to make new prints. Even if it’s a digital version, whatever.

**John:** Great.

**Kate:** Just a new version of the film that could then be put on streaming or released on home video, that’s awesome.

**John:** Well, Kate, what you’re saying, which is very encouraging to me, is that it’s not that the negative had been lost to all time. So they had a negative. So if you have a negative you can make a beautiful digital version of it and that digital version can go out.

So do you know anything about what was the hold up with Fresh Horses? Was it a music issue? Why had it gone off–?

**Kate:** Fresh Horses was released by Hemdale which I’m fairly sure does not exist and has not existed for many years, but I mean, Hemdale also put out Blade Runner. What was I just watching this weekend that was a Hemdale movie? Oh, Miracle Mile from the ‘80s.

I would just assume that they folded and whoever the kind of rights defaulted to are like “We don’t need to do anything with movies like Fresh Horses or Miracle Mile.” I know Miracle Mile got a Blu-Ray a couple of years ago and obviously like Blade Runner has many home video editions, but you know, that’s a beloved and classic film, so it’s a little easier to figure out the rights situation for that than something like a Fresh Horses, which is not as beloved.

**John:** This idea of being able to watch Fresh Horses, it seems odd to do a screening of Fresh Horses because it wasn’t like a masterpiece that everyone was clamoring for, but it is very true that most people who are going to see this movie are going to see this movie on video. And that’s true even for the movies that are coming out next week at the cinema, most people are ultimately going to see that movie on home video and how do you make sure that that home video is going to still be around 20 years, 30 years, 40 years down the road?

**Kate:** I am really disturbed by the fact that Amazon and Netflix seem to not care about putting any of their original movies or TV series on disc. Like I know Stranger Things got a disc release, but like people really had to pressure Amazon to get Blu-Rays of Wonderstruck. And to me that suggests a scary overall trend for those companies that they’re treating these products as disposable. It’s like we’re not even going to put it on any kind of permanent format. It’s either on the streaming service or it’s not on the streaming service. And that’s a bummer for folks who still like home media, who want to guarantee that they will have these movies or TV shows in perpetuity.

Yeah, and I think there is a market for home video, especially as home theaters become more and more in depth and people get more into the idea of movie screenings in your own home. I just wish more folks would realize that.

**John:** I just saw the trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is a Netflix film, black and white, gorgeous-looking, at least from the trailer. I mean, of course it’s going to be gorgeous. He’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. But it will be fascinating to see is there going to be a Blu-Ray for Roma? Because it’s going to come out theatrically and on Netflix. And for Alfonso Cuarón as a filmmaker, fantastic he got to make exactly the movie he wanted to make. He probably got the budget he wanted. It’s great for cinema that Netflix stepped up and sort of helped him make this movie. But I do wonder whether it’s great for cinema ten years from now, 20 years from now that this was made for a digital platform that has no vested interest in the long term existence of a physical version of this thing?

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good example. I feel like also Scorsese’s The Irishman is going to be a real make it or break it moment for Netflix. You know, the idea – if we’re not giving home video releases, if these are films aren’t getting nominated for Oscars, if they’re not picking up theatrically. You know, the Irishman especially is about as prestige of a prestige project as you could get, and popular as a prestige project could get. And if that doesn’t get the kind of reception that a normal theatrical release might then I think that kind of indicates where the vibe is on Netflix in terms of how they’re going to release prestige movies going forward.

**John:** Yeah. It’s easy to look at Netflix now, which is so successful and everybody has it and it’s thriving, but there’s lot of companies that just go away. And if Netflix just goes away, what happens to all those things that were made for Netflix? And it’s not entirely clear. And folks who I know who have made deals with Netflix, no one I’ve talked to has anything in their deals that says like if the company doesn’t exist ten years from now I get the rights back to something.

**Kate:** Yeah. That’s got to be really sobering as a creator. I mean, I figured this out when I was writing the piece. Only ten years ago Netflix had their first production arm which was called Red Letter Media, which has since folded. So I think it’s really hard for anybody to try to predict where Netflix or any of the streaming services are going to be ten years from now. So much has changed.

**John:** Speaking of so much has changed, so this is a thing that’s been recurring on the podcast and we could probably do a segment on it every week, but this past week it looks like MoviePass has gone under. If it hasn’t officially gone under, it’s about as close as you get to going under. The stock did a reverse split which I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s worth very little. And people who try to leave the service are being prohibited from leaving the service. What’s been your relationship with MoviePass?

**Kate:** So I got MoviePass at the end of last year. I did the annual $90 one. I’ve gone to about 12 movies, so I’m like it paid for itself. Great. I have a lot of friends in the LA rep scene in particular who have really been using it to go to way more rep screenings than they would normally ever go to. And to me that’s a bummer with like the loss of MoviePass is the ability to see more movies than you would on a normal budget.

But, yeah, you know, I do think MoviePass is ultimately going to be a good thing to show that there is an appetite for these kind of pass programs. I would love it for instance if all the LA repertory theaters would ban together and be like, OK, you pay $25 a month and then you get X number of tickets to the Egyptian, the New Beverly, etc.

But I mean the MoviePass flameout has been kind of spectacular to watch on film Twitter, because, you know, it’s a totally unsustainable model. We all knew–

**John:** Yeah. We knew it was. This is all going to end in tears. It was like taking Omarosa into the White House. Like it wasn’t going to last. You knew it was doomed.

I think on the whole MoviePass you have to see the pros of it, in that for about a year a bunch of VC money gave people free movie tickets.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it helped the movie industry and it allowed people to see more movies. I think it definitely got more people to see the indie films because it’s like, “Well, I got to use this thing. I’ve seen everything else. I’m going to go see this movie.” And I think that does help those things.

You’re the first person I’ve heard talk about this idea of an indie pass that sort of goes to all those smaller chains. That would be fantastic.

**Kate:** I would be amazing.

**John:** If it helps keep those art houses in business the same way that we need to keep video stores in business that would be fantastic. Bigger chains, AMCs, have rolled out their own plans which seem great. And I guess I’m all for studios figuring out deals with those exhibitors just to sort of get butts in seats and keep butts in seats. Because what MoviePass did show is that people do want to still go to the movie theaters. There’s this myth that as home screens get better, as TVs get better people are just going to stay home and only watch movies on their TV screens. And it’s like, no, people actually want to go out and be with people and see movies.

And what was partly doing MoviePass in is that young people with friends were like well we all have MoviePass, let’s go out and see like three movies. And they would.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And if we can encourage that behavior that’s awesome.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I would say I definitely know a lot more young folks that got really into MoviePass, but I’ve also talked to some folks that like their parents – this became a huge thing to get them back to the theater after many years of not going to the theater. You know, the idea of a deal suddenly becomes more exciting.

But, you know, last weekend, I went last Sunday. I went to a matinee of BlacKkKlansman at the ArcLight that was almost sold out. And then that night I went to a screening of Wanda at the Egyptian that was sold out. It was in the small theater, the Spielberg. But, you know, obviously we’re in the movie capital of the world so that’s necessarily the best comp for most of the country.

But I do think that, you know, when you make these options easier for people to get on board with, how about that, they go back to the theater. It’s not rocket science. And I would hope folks realize the void that MoviePass will leave and we get an indie pass, or more subscription programs from major chains. Because I do think that people like being among other people. Like I really enjoy, this is a similar thing with video stores, even if you don’t talk to anybody else, you don’t like meet up with friends, just being among other people, not in front of your black computer screen, in very nice.

**John:** And your pieces on the different video stores you visited, I think that sense of community was really crucial and something I’d kind of forgotten. Is that while my local Blockbuster was just like whatever, who cares about that, when you go to a place that’s genuinely a video store with people who like love movies, not just the employees, but the people who are wandering through the aisles looking for stuff, they can give you recommendations. You can see the taxonomy is very much set up based on a hive brain of like these kinds of movies belong together even if it’s not sort of genre wise which you’d expect.

You have some maps of some of your interior layouts of these video stores that really show how they’re thinking about movies and how stuff fits together. Bookstores, which are thriving these days, smaller bookstores are thriving these days, I think it’s the same sense. That people want to go to a place where people kind of care about the things that are on the shelves.

**Kate:** Yeah. It was really interesting. Last Saturday I went up to Odyssey Video in North Hollywood which is closing unfortunately. It was an extremely cool video store. They had a lot of rare VHS still, particularly on the children’s side of things. But that was really interesting because it’s an everything must go kind of sale. So they’re selling off their entire stock. But it was a Saturday afternoon at four o’clock and there are 25 people in this video store right now. And we were all extremely amused. There was this extremely precocious kid who was just like running around being like “Do you have Poltergeist? Do you have Pretty in Pink? Why can’t I go in the back?”

And, you know, it was really invigorating to see like an 11-year-old kid just like so excited about movies, about picking up the physical movie, like crossing movies off the list. And like, I don’t know, streaming is just never going to generate that kind of enthusiasm. Like I don’t care what anybody says. That kind of tactile human community experience. We’re just never going to get that via a streaming platform.

**John:** You’ve convinced me. So I would say, and as recently as three weeks ago I was having a little Twitter disagreement with Robin Sloan, an author, and he had basically the thesis of video stores, things were better in the video store era. And I said, yes, if you compare to streaming. But if you add in iTunes, there’s actually more availability. We don’t have the real numbers to see sort of how many things are on iTunes, but I’ve been convinced over the past few weeks that something really has been lost as we’ve transitioned so thoroughly away from physical media that some stuff is just very hard to find.

And when I actually finally had to go out and get a physical copy of The Flamingo Kid, I realized like I have no player that can actually play this thing, which is a very strange place to get to in your life. Where I have all these drawers full of DVDs that I haven’t watched in a long time because instead I just watch Netflix or I watch iTunes. And I’ve actually found myself being guilty of like I think I have a DVD of that, but it’s actually just $2.99 for me to get it on iTunes, and so I just look for it on iTunes. And in some cases the iTunes quality is better. So it’s not a crisis to do that. But I’m not going back to those DVDs very often. And the existence of physical media is sort of a bulwark. It’s a protection against things being lost.

**Kate:** Yeah. My friend Matt Shiverdecker is very in the loop in terms of home video licensing and who owns what and that kind of thing and he has one of the most impressive home collections I’ve ever seen. And he has just kind of a running list of, you know, here are things that never got put on DVD that I love. Here are things that never got put on any kind of HD transfer that I love.

I mean, it’s shocking some of the things that aren’t available. A couple of months ago I was looking for Cronenberg’s Crash and I ended up watching it on YouTube with Spanish subtitles because that was the only version of the movie I could find. And I was like this was an important movie in the ‘90s. The fact that this was only on an out-of-print DVD right now is crazy. Cronenberg is a major filmmaker.

**John:** Yeah. Well, we need to talk before we wrap this up, we had to talk about piracy, because in some ways piracy is both the answer to and the cause of a lot of these problems. Is that without piracy some of these things would be impossible to find. If you hadn’t found that bootleg Spanish thing on YouTube you would not have been able to watch that. So, good that it exists there, sort of, with an asterisk. But piracy is also part of the reason why these companies feel like it’s not in their interest to try to make a legal version of it available because they’re like I could spend all this time figuring out the rights on this thing, getting it on iTunes, getting it on a streaming service, and I’m not going to sell anything because someone is going to just get the pirated version. That’s what happened to the music industry. That’s what’s going to happen to me. So–

**Kate:** It’s a tough conundrum. I don’t know what the good answer is to that because, you know, I would say I did a lot more torrenting and illegally watching of movies like ten years ago. And I would say it was much easier to do then than it is now.

But there are many things you’re like, you know, I have tried the legal methods. I have done my diligence. If I can’t find it, I’m going to watch the illegal version. Like, I’m sorry, and thank god that there are still people who put movies like Crash and Times Square up on YouTube to find, because otherwise then we can’t access the movie. And that’s really terrible.

**John:** Consolidation in the industry has left us with so few companies controlling so much. And some of your folks have acknowledged as you’ve talked to them about their video stores is that in a weird way we ceded control to giant corporations who are ultimately gatekeepers of like whether a thing can be seen or not. So, between Apple and Netflix and HBO, sort of those, and art studios which are so small, in some ways the zillion companies that made all these movies it was better because there were multiple people producing films. They were going out to many, many venues. There were video stores all across the country. And as the funnel gets narrower and narrower, I don’t know if this actually happening, but if someone at Apple really despises a certain movie they could just make the movie not available. And there’s really sort of nothing we as a culture or as that filmmaker could step up and get in the way of that.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, you know, losing that kind of personal choice that video stores provided where you were not at the mercy of corporations. Where you could rent a Hitchcock classic and like a garbage horror movie and like a kid’s program all in the same day. When that control is given to major corporations who have bottom lines and financial interests to hit, you know, they’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is watching. They’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is taking note of. But that doesn’t mean that those films still aren’t valid and deserve to be seen by the people who want to see them.

**John:** Cool. As we wrap this up, do you have any recommendation for a film that people should check out and where they should find it if it’s hard to find?

**Kate:** Ooh, interesting. I feel like I could go all day on this kind of subject. Let’s see. I was just talking about I found Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains on DVD, which was great. I’d been looking for that one for quite a while. So, something I would recommend, if you guys don’t have FilmStruck, you’ve got to get FilmStruck. They are really picking up a lot of the slack in terms of classic movies. And not just, you know, when we think of classic movies we think of like ‘50s epics, but you know like Bill & Ted is currently on FilmStruck. So, it’s a tide that raises all boats.

But my favorite thing on FilmStruck is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which is completely unavailable elsewhere. It’s this incredible gangster movie with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. It’s most famous because Elaine May fought like hell with Paramount about the final cut. At one point she stole the print from them and was like hiding it in her garage because she didn’t want them to keep tinkering with it. This movie is very hard to find and it is now on FilmStruck, so you’ve got to check it out.

**John:** Fantastic. FilmStruck I’ve not used yet but I definitely will. Rian Johnson loves it and tweets about it a lot. So that will be fantastic.

All right, it comes time for our One Cool Things. So this is where we recommend things that are out there in culture that people should go out and see or read. In my case it is a book. It is My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum. It is fantastic. So you will probably recognize Guy because he’s often a guest on talk show kind of things. He’s a comedian. He’s been on Midnight, Larry Wilmore’s show, Chelsea Lately. But this book he’s written is fantastic.

So, it details sort of his growing up in rural Northern California, sort of the agriculture community. It’s just great, great writing and he’s really, really funny. So, Mindy Kaling who was our guest two weeks ago, she wrote the forward to the book and she’s exactly correct when she says that it is fantastic and you should check it out. So, Guy Branum’s My Life as a Goddess.

**Kate:** That sounds great. I’ve been hearing a lot of really wonderful things about that book. I’ve got to check it out.

**John:** It reminded me of Lindy West’s book, which I also loved, and sort of because Guy is a big, giant guy. And it reminded me some of what she wrote about in her book. But the specificity of where he grew up and what his life was like was fantastic. And not to spoil too much about it, but My Life as a Goddess refers to this Greek goddess who suffers all these challenges and then at one moment realizes, wait, I’m a goddess, and just transforms everything around her. And that sense of recognizing your own personal self-power is great.

**Kate:** Sounds awesome.

**John:** Cool. Anything more you want to recommend? Because you just made a great recommendation on that film.

**Kate:** Yeah. I’m going to plug a great movie t-shirt website. It’s called Tees-En-Scène. It is Colin Stacy who is a wonderful dude in Texas who has taken up the mantle of making these incredible t-shirts that highlight female writer-directors mostly. There are two out right now. There is the Elaine May t-shirt who we were just talking about. And then he just put out a t-shirt for Barbara Loden who made Wanda. He’s got an Amy Heckerling t-shirt in the pipeline. But they’re really cool because he pulls the frame of Written and Directed by from the movie itself on the t-shirt so it’s not just like boring text.

**John:** Oh neat.

**Kate:** He’s got Kathleen Collins coming up. And also some of the proceeds are funneled back to women of color filmmakers. So you get to get a dope t-shirt and you get to support a great cause. Check it out, Tees-En-Scene, or if you want to google Elaine May t-shirt, Barbara Loden t-shirt you can find it.

**John:** Very, very cool. All right. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Kate, are you on Twitter?

**Kate:** I am. I’m @thathagengrrl like Riot Grrl.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But I will note that podcast feeds are actually directory based, and so Apple does not control your ability to get to our podcast. So, you really could find us any way. You could just type it into your little browser of choice and it would still be there. So for all the talk about like, oh, censorship control, podcasts are still an RSS-based medium. They’re still available out there in the world. They’re more free like the web than people think they are. Apple doesn’t actually host us. We’re just sort of out there.

But you can find us anywhere, just search for Scriptnotes. If you find us on a service, leave a comment because that helps people find the show.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to Kate’s pieces that she’s written for the Black List. You’ll also find transcripts for our show at johnaugust.com. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. We also sell seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Kate Hagen, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about reading and video and some great recommendations.

**Kate:** Thanks so much, John. And just one final thing. If you’ve got a video store in your neighborhood and you haven’t been there yet, what are you doing? Go to the video store.

**John:** Go to your video store. Thanks Kate.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Kate Hagen](https://blog.blcklst.com/@thathagengrrl)!
* [In Search of the Last Great Video Store](https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982) by Kate Hagen
* [The Black List](https://blcklst.com/register/highlights.html#industry)
* [Netflix’s DVD service](https://dvd.netflix.com/MemberHome)
* [Fresh Horses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2wY3uJdng) was one of those missing movies.
* [The Fall of MoviePass](https://variety.com/2018/film/news/moviepass-ending-subscription-service-1202891561/) and its [reverse stock split](https://deadline.com/2018/07/moviepass-parents-stock-plummets-44-after-reverse-split-takes-effect-1202433444/)
* Kate recommends [Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06kCwPpyjCk), [Mikey and Nicky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_qMg8ZG0ic) and [FilmStruck](https://www.filmstruck.com/us/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=MIDF&utm_term=filmstruck&utm_content=A200_A203_A015526&c=A200_A203_A015526&pid=adwords&cid=ppc_adwords_A200_A203_A015526&creator=Fetch&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIv_z-toj93AIVl6DsCh1Y0QjEEAAYASAAEgLAkfD_BwE) to watch classic movies.
* [My Life as a Goddess](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075RNFTTW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Guy Branum
* [Tees-En-Scène](http://www.teesenscene.com) sells shirts that highlight and support female writer/directors.
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Kate Hagen](https://twitter.com/thathagengrrl) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_364.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-mindy-kaling).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, today’s episode has some explicit words. It has some F-bombs. So if you’re in the car with your kids, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 362 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is all the way off in Europe someplace. I’m not even sure what country he’s in right now. But luckily we have someone more than qualified to take over his spot.

**Mindy Kaling:** Craig knew that I was coming and was like, “I’m fucking out of here. I’m not doing this.” Which hurt my feelings actually. But what can you do?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Mindy Kaling is a writer and sometimes director whose credits include The Office, The Mindy Project, and Champions. As an actress, she’s appeared in all those shows plus Ocean’s 8, A Wrinkle in Time, Inside Out. Plus she has two great books. She makes me feel incredibly lazy. Mindy Kaling, welcome to the show.

**Mindy:** Thank you. I think that’s why I do it, to make other people feel like they’re not doing enough.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Well done. You’ve done it very well. It also turns out we’re neighbors. I sort of knew you lived generally in the vicinity because we talked about the same frozen yogurt place, so I knew you must be somewhere around here, but we’re close by.

**Mindy:** Yeah. We both go to the same farmer’s market I bet.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the crucial thing about Los Angeles is frozen yogurt, farmer’s market, good little walks around the neighborhood.

**Mindy:** Do you know if our farmer’s market has organic fruit or does it just sell fruit? Because I go there thinking that it’s all organic and everything there is organic, but I have no idea.

**John:** I think it’s largely organic. You’re talking about the large farmer’s market?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, well, yes. So I think a lot of it is. And sometimes there are probably peaches that have been sung to by like special people who go out into the fields and sing to their peaches. I think it’s all good.

**Mindy:** I never ask because I think it’s insulting to ask people if it’s organic. If it is organic they’ll be like, “Are you kidding me? Why else am I doing this?” But I also feel like, oh, they could just be repurposing stuff from Von’s and I have no idea. Whatever.

**John:** The history of farmer’s markets is actually fascinating because they really do make more money by selling the fruit and vegetables to you directly because they’re not selling it wholesome to some place that’s selling it to the grocery store. So that’s why they exist. And to make us feel guilty about not eating only farmer’s market food. I don’t know.

Today I don’t want to talk about farmer’s markets, I want to talk about writing. I want to talk about writing, especially half-hour, which I just don’t know anything about and you know so much about it because you’ve written a bunch of them. But I also want to get into sort of how you got started because so many of the people who listen to the show are aspiring writers and so they’re thinking about like “Well how do I go from this person who is writing this one script in my house to actually writing on a show?” And so I want to talk about that journey for you if that’s OK.

**Mindy:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** Cool. So looking through your backstory, you grew up in the east coast, right?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** At what point did you start to think like, oh hey, I want to write? And did you start to think I want to write for screen versus writing for a book? How early did writing come into the field?

**Mindy:** I had very strict, very loving but strict parents who didn’t let me do a lot of activities. My parents both immigrated to the states in the ‘70s and were very suspicious of American culture and its effect on its children. And so I spent a lot of time alone. My mother was a doctor, so I spent a lot of time sitting alone in the phlebotomy room of her – she was an OB-GYN – in the phlebotomy room of her office, which is where they take bloods. Drawn. They draw bloods there. So basically what I would do was sit in a little desk and I could bring a book with me, or I could do nothing. But those were my choices. And this is obviously well before cell phones. It was early ‘80s.

And then every 20 or so minutes I’d have to scuttle out while they took bloods and I’d stand in the hallway, while a patient was getting her blood drawn. So, I started writing because I loved reading. I absolutely loved reading. I read so quickly. And I wasn’t reading like brainy books. I was just read The Babysitter’s Club, whatever. And I started writing because there was a typewriter in there. And I just thought it was cool. I thought the sound it made sounded cool and official and grown up. And I just started writing on it.

And then the first thing I wrote was plays because plays, writing dialogue seemed easier than writing anything else. So, I thought that was significant that the first thing I would write was just how you say and speak things. Although now it feels like it’s probably very natural for children to write dialogue rather than writing fiction or nonfiction.

**John:** You’re just typing on this typewriter and you’re writing things that you and your friends would perform? Or were they just kind of for you?

**Mindy:** Oh, I had no friends. So it was just me. It was just me and I would show it to my mom and dad. So I was really raised with this idea of like how do I please mom and dad, how do I please mom and dad. So I would write things that I thought they would think was funny. So the first thing I remember writing, and I think my dad still has this somewhere, was a comedy play about a haunted house. And I remember when people ask, because for whatever reason I’ve done so many interviews, that people always ask “What was your first joke that you wrote?” And I think the first joke I wrote was in this play where a mummy said – a mummy who was living in the haunted house – a witch, a mummy, and a vampire lived in the haunted house. And the mummy turned to the vampire and was like, “I don’t know what the taxes are for this haunted house.”

I don’t even think I really understood what taxes were, but it seemed like a grown up term, so that was probably the first joke I wrote.

**John:** But you had a sense of the structure of a joke. It was a comment on a thing that these two people were talking about. Something that doesn’t seem related to a haunted house. Like taxes and haunted houses are a weird thing to join together, so you already had that sense of a joke.

**Mindy:** One thing doesn’t belong. And I see adults griping about things that they seem to think is funny, you know, and relatable, or just that my parents would gripe about that. So that was the first thing.

And I just, more than writing though, I just read. I think that you’ll find that most writers now, like I have a six-month-old baby so I don’t read as much now, but almost everyone I know who is a screenwriter or TV writer read so much as a child. And it wasn’t like classy books. They’d read through all the Hardy Boys, all the Babysitter’s Club, pamphlets, magazines. Anything that would come – because I wasn’t really allowed to do anything else and I wasn’t good at sports, so.

**John:** I was an obsessive reader, too. So if I was in the bathroom I would have to have something to read. So I would read the back of shampoo bottles. Or every time we were in the car I was always reading. And so when I finally got my driver’s license I had no idea where anything was because I had never really looked out the windows of the car. I was just reading a book, again and again.

**Mindy:** I actually get worried because I think that the desire to read would be so replaced so easily with looking at a phone, so with my daughter I have to get her – and I’m so out of it that I don’t even know, do kids read books anymore or do they just read on their iPads? I have no idea?

**John:** Yeah, so they do still read books. Kids, there was this whole movement towards Kindles and stuff like that. But my daughter still prefers physical books. She’s 13. So they still will read, but it’s really true that they are drawn to their phone. And that boredom time where you would have picked up a book, they’ll definitely pick up their phone. And so that’s the challenge you’re going to face is how to convince them it’s worth the extra effort to grab the book rather than grabbing their phone.

**Mindy:** Oh no.

**John:** But the kinds of jokes you’re talking about, you must have been watching TV. You must have been watching some movies to get a sense of people talking and sort of that rhythm. Or was it all just observing?

**Mindy:** Yeah. I was a late bloomer on TV. You know, a lot of comedy guys — I’ll read like Paul Feig or Judd Apatow, what they did when they were children. Their parents let them watch TV. And I wasn’t allowed to watch TV until I think it was probably junior high when I had kind of established that I wasn’t a kid that was going to do drugs or be a bad kid. We never had cable. All through high school we never had cable. So if I wanted to watch cable I would have to go to someone else’s house.

But what became a big tradition in my house was 7th and 8th grade my parents really liked Seinfeld. So I could watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights. I don’t even know, Seinfeld, Cheers, I don’t even know if I was really allowed to watch Friends. Friends was really something that I kind of caught up on when I was in my 20s. So that’s it. And that was a big deal. And my parents really loved comedy and they saw like, “OK, this is sort of – this is really funny. We love George. This isn’t going to be something that is going to corrupt our kids or is going to make us feel uncomfortable when we’re watching it.”

And then I think that they also just saw that I really loved it. So Must See TV was massive for me. Thursday nights is when I could watch TV. It also felt, I think, weird or perverted to my parents that I would come home on a Monday evening and just like turn on TV. Like I think they thought it’s a work day.

**John:** Absolutely. You have to work to do.

**Mindy:** You have work to do and homework to do. And it’s good because I have this very addictive personality that I would have been that kid. Like I never watched – I think the symbol for the thing that they were the most scared of was Married with Children. They felt like if you watched Married with Children, you were like really braindead. You were going down a bad path. And to a lesser degree The Simpsons.

**John:** Wow.

**Mindy:** Like I had to make my parents sit down and watch The Simpsons and be like, “No, this is funny and actually smart and satirical.” But, yeah, Married with Children was just like – in fact, the entire Fox Network I think was something that my parents were suspicious of. Because it had that kind of irreverent, Garbage Pail Kid, like we don’t care what you think thing. So I was really sheltered from a lot of that stuff growing up.

**John:** I would have guessed that the Mary Tyler Moore Show or those would be the templates, because I look at some of the work you’ve done and they’re workplace comedies, they are a woman trying to find her place in this world. I would have guessed that you are person who was watching all the reruns of those growing up.

**Mindy:** No, I love Mary Tyler Moore. My parents did let me watch Nick at Nite. So I would watch Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore. If it was black and white they were like, “OK, there’s nothing–“

**John:** Very classy.

**Mindy:** “Very classy. Nothing.” And a lot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. So I did get to watch. But again we didn’t have Nick at Nite because it was on cable so it would be like once a week we’d go to my aunt’s house to have dinner and they had cable so we would watch. I would watch all of Nick at Nite. But it wasn’t really until later that Mary Tyler Moore I really got into it. But it’s such an amazing show.

**John:** Now, when did you decide to study writing and make that be your primary focus? Was that your undergrad degree?

**Mindy:** Yes. I majored in playwriting and the classics. So I did Latin. Equally unhelpful majors. No chances. Which actually was great because I feel that a lot of women, particularly young Indian women, ask like how did you persuade your parents to let you do writing and acting. And the truth is I didn’t have, while they were very strict and like worried about me having bad influences as a kid, they were very open to me being a writer and an actor as long as I was achieving some success at it. You know, but I’m sorry, your question was did I have a degree in writing.

Yeah, but I’ll tell you this. I went to Dartmouth and I took playwriting, but I felt that I pretty much learned nothing from playwriting in college. I think the classes I took in terms of writing didn’t help me. It’s not that the classes were bad. It’s just that wasn’t the experiences that helped me. It was writing short plays for my friends to perform, because that’s when I got to see, “OK, what do actors like to say. How do actors do well?” Because otherwise when you’re just taking a class you have no idea. You can write a one-act play, try to write a full-length play. And we had great professors. But none of that was really helpful. And frankly none of that was really fun.

It was all my extracurriculars in college that kind of taught me what I wanted to do. Because I took improv and I would do these short one-act plays that I’d put up at our black box theater at Dartmouth. And that’s what was like, “OK, well this is really what I want to do.”

**John:** So doing these extracurricular things, did you find a tribe of really great, smart, fun people you could sort of write for? How did you get into that stuff? Because what you’re describing seems very consistent with a lot of people. Whatever the degree they got, great, but it was everything else that was not part of the college curriculum that was really what they learned during those years.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, it really helped me because I really wanted to make friends and I was nervous about making friends. So what helped was I was like, “OK, I’m this loser who came to college. I have no friends. I really like dynamic, funny, actor type personalities,” because I didn’t know what a comedy writer was or anything back then.

And so I met them through doing improv and because I was like funny enough to get on the improv team, though not like the funniest person on the team by any measure, those were the people that I started hanging out with. And then I was like, “Oh, it would be fun to write for them.”

And what I found was often I would write myself parts in things simply because there was just, at least in Dartmouth in the early 2000s there was not a ton of young women that were like, “Oh, I want to really put myself out there as a comedian.” So I kind of did it because I was like, oh, well there’s female roles. And I loved the attention but I was more scared of it.

**John:** Now, coming out of college what was your plan and what were the actual first kind of months and years like coming out of college? What were the next steps you did?

**Mindy:** Yeah. That was a really exciting period, but if I look back in my life and think about the time when I felt the most uneasy and depressed, even though I’m not a depressed person, but the time that I felt, oh, what’s going to happen. Post-college was really fucking hard. And I graduated when I was 21 and I started working on The Office at 24, so we’re talking three years. But it’s that time when a single week feels like it lasts a year. When you’re so ambitious and no one knows who you are and no one is giving you an outlet. And it was really hard because at the time, by the time I ended my time at Dartmouth I was like a big – I was a big star in the drama/comedy/performing world. Like it was great that I went there because that would not have been the case if I had gone to an actual artsy school, like Yale or NYU or something. I would never have continued on to be a writer.

But because nobody really wanted to do what I wanted to do there. This is like well past – Phil and Chris had already graduated. I didn’t overlap with them at all. I felt like such a big shot on that campus. And then went to New York and it was just that thing that I didn’t think would happen to me which was that nobody cared. I was a babysitter. I couldn’t get – I wanted to just go straight to SNL. But we didn’t have like a Harvard Lampoon. We had a comedy newspaper that I used to write for, but it didn’t have that kind of pre-professional edge to it.

**John:** And there wasn’t like an alumni network that could sort of get you in places in New York?

**Mindy:** No.

**John:** None of that?

**Mindy:** No. It was Dr. Seuss was the only other person. Because truly, no, because Shonda wasn’t Shonda yet. Phil and Chris hadn’t done stuff yet. So there wasn’t that network out there.

**John:** Phil and Chris are Lord and Miller?

**Mindy:** Yes. Yes. And Shonda is Shonda Rhimes.

**John:** Shonda lives in the neighborhood, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah, she does. I keep thinking I know what her house is and I slow down in front of it, not realizing how creepy that must be. Because someone at Shonda’s level I think probably has security.

**John:** Yes.

**Mindy:** And so they’re probably photographing me and showing her photos and she’s like, “Ugh, Mindy Kaling.”

**John:** Again.

**Mindy:** “Sitting in front of my house again.”

**John:** She follows you to Dartmouth. She follows you to Los Angeles. It’s terrible.

**Mindy:** I know. What a creep that girl is, she must be saying. And I email her a lot, too, about – not weirdly about writing stuff, because the drama world and comedy world are so different, but about baby things. She’s very helpful.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Mindy:** Sorry, so I was telling my sad tale of me being in NYC without a job.

**John:** It’s a very classic story of like you move from college to NYC. You’re sort of in your ramen days. You’re just trying to–

**Mindy:** Yeah. 9/11 happened a month after we moved there. You can’t go in the subway.

**John:** Good timing.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And so my parents were really antsy about me being there, too. I was babysitting. And that was the time where, when people ask why I’m successful I think it comes from this one feeling I remember happening there was like my panic is very useful to me. And my panic is something that is so deeply uncomfortable – keeping me up at night, can’t sleep – that until I can do something with the panic like I really can’t function.

So my panic when I was 21 when I didn’t immediately go write on SNL, I didn’t even get a job as a page at NBC. Like I was rejected from that even. My friend and I who was kind of my – she’s more of an actress, but my friend Brenda from college, we would – she was a substitute teacher and I was a babysitter. So we had opposite hours. But there was always one or two hours in the middle of the day that we overlapped. And during that time we would always hang out and either watch TV or go for a walk in Prospect Park. And so we started just kind of improvising characters and being like what do we really want to write and what’s fun to play?

And so we had always had a kind of theatrical friendship where we would be doing bits with each other and we kind of started improvising in these really absurd improvising world where she was Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. And we found that we could walk around Prospect Park for like three miles and improvise in character.

And as we were doing it it wasn’t even a thing where I’d be like, “OK, well what if we did this?” because we were in character the whole time and these whole backstories that we just invented for these two guys came up. And this is back in 2001. So, you know, they were like – I mean, they’re extremely famous now. But this was like a different – I don’t know if you remember. It was a different kind of fame. Because there’s like the fame of youth and who they were dating really mattered and all that. And you were just bludgeoned with it in magazines.

**John:** And Premiere Magazine, sort of like people to watch, on the rise, that kind of–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was a couple of years after they had won I think an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. So they were both like the biggest young A-list celebrities. And I think they’re both like about ten years older than us, or seven or eight years older than us. So they loomed really large for us, in pop culture anyway. So we just started doing that. And we didn’t know what we would do with it. It just amused us.

And then we were like well what if we just like wrote down some of the stuff they were doing and we wrote this play called Matt and Ben that we ended up performing at the Fringe Festival. And then it won the Fringe Festival which was really where we – where I at least, because Brenda stayed in New York to do acting and I wanted to write. So I moved to LA off of the success of that.

**John:** So let’s connect some dots here. To get into the Fringe, so you write this play and then do you submit the play in its written form into the Fringe Festival or how do you get into the Fringe Festival?

**Mindy:** Yeah, OK, so this is the nitty gritty stuff that I feel like I always gloss over because it feels so logistical, but yes, I know that this is interesting for young people who are trying to make it. So, at that point – this is like not pre-Internet, but like barely Internet, you couldn’t submit even something online. You would go to the Fringe Festival. That was the big, in our big group of friends of theater – off-off-Broadway theater people. They’re like, well, the one thing where you can be seen if you’re not cast is the International Fringe Festival, which wasn’t even that old. It was barely a thing. It’s definitely not like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

But it was the only way that you could just kind of be seen by anybody. And you knew that if you could make it there’s like 500 things that go up in the Fringe Festival. They have a huge acceptance rate, or at least it’s like 50%. And if you can make it to the top 50 of the 500 then people will kind of review it in Time Out New York and everything like that.

And I was like, OK, I’ve beat these odds before. I got into Dartmouth. I was like a big star at Dartmouth. Like maybe we could do this together.

So we downloaded the application. We wrote up what we thought the play would be. We sent in $50 which was a lot of money. And you just waited. And we didn’t get an email saying that you were accepted. You get like a letter. I’m really dating myself now. I sound like I’m a thousand years old.

And they accepted it. But it wasn’t even this delicious thing of, “Oh, we’ve been accepted,” because at that time they took so many people. And then it’s a kind of cool thing the Fringe Festival. I don’t know if they do it now where there’s all these tiny little venues in Downtown New York that you wouldn’t even know about that were open for these – the Fringe Festival is like two or three weeks. So we did our play in the Fringe Festival at a – it was East Broadway was the subway stop you’d have to get off. It was like a Chinese cultural center’s auditorium is where we did our play.

And so you’d walk into the lobby and there’s all this Chinese cultural posters and things, actually pretty interesting. Great festivals every year. And then they had this beautiful auditorium that was for, I don’t know, telling senior citizens where your Chinese resources were in the neighborhood. So they were like, yeah sure, we’ll do that. And so really the Fringe Festival is all based on all these tiny little auditoriums agreeing to have these people.

So, long story short, we did I think it was only three nights. The Fringe Festival is just three nights. And what we did was we went out of pocket. We borrowed money from – I think we figured out that, somehow the number was like $2,500 that if we could borrow $2,500 to promote the show ourselves then we would make that back in ticket sales and we could pay back everyone. So we made up little postcards with Matt and Ben, with like a little picture of them with their eyes covered and with all the dates of our three shows on them. And then we just would go around New York City. I would go to Barnes and Nobles and I would stick them in all the different cool magazines.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** That I thought people would buy. Which is completely illegal. So I would just go and look like I was reading through a magazine and stick one in there. So, I’d hit like six Barnes and Nobles and stick the little flyer thing in all of those. And then all through Park Slope, and the East Village, and the West Village we would just put up signs for Matt and Ben. And I think because of the subject material, which we didn’t know at the time was – because of the subject material people were like even more interested in seeing it.

And so we did three performances. And then we were like voted. We didn’t even know there was like a thing at the end where they like Sundance or whatever, they say like, “Oh, here’s the awards,” because we didn’t know. How could you possibly see everything?

But we won Best Production at that festival.

**John:** And the production is just the two of you, correct?

**Mindy:** It’s just the two of us. There’s like a sofa. Actually, it’s very much like a sitcom set. It’s just a sofa and just a living room. I think we kind of subconsciously just thought like, “OK, this should just look like a sitcom.” But it was very easy to move that play around. And we just needed the two of us. And we couldn’t have paid any other actors to do it which is why I acted in it.

And that was very lucky, because if I hadn’t done that I don’t think I would have been a performer on The Office. So yeah.

**John:** Now at this point are you Mindy Kaling or are you using your longer name? Where were you at in your transition?

**Mindy:** I think, because I was so – even though I didn’t have an agent or anything, I had done standup before that and I remember this so distinctly that I had spent weeks and weeks trying to get in this one standup show that was at this little hotel in like the East 20s. And weeks and weeks. And I had like this – I worked so hard to do a tight ten. And you had to ask a friend who had already performed in it, who was barely a friend, if they could ask someone to do it. And this wasn’t the time when anyone was like, yeah, let’s try to make room for people who look different. It’s like, hey, it’s fine if it’s all white men and one guy’s girlfriend. That’s fine. We can do a whole night.

And I finally did it and I remember the emcee butchered my last name when he was introducing me and made a joke about it. And I don’t even–

**John:** How do you pronounce your last name?

**Mindy:** Chokalingam. And so he was so – I don’t even think he meant to – I don’t think he’s like a racist guy, but because he messed it up he did like a little Indian accent to cover for it. And then when I was there I was so shaken, because I didn’t know – I wasn’t like good at standup so I didn’t know how to roll with it and deal with a white standup comedian who doesn’t know who to pronounce a long Indian name that I think the set went terribly. I had invited all my friends to come see it. And I remember on the subway going home – one of my best friends is half Asian – and I was sitting there and I was like I have to not have that feeling anymore where people feel – not even people who are racist – that they feel uneasy about saying my name because they don’t know how to pronounce. I was like, you know what, I know why Bob Dylan did it. I know why Woody Allen did it. Like if they did it and their names are even more easy to pronounce Jewish names, I got to just do this.

And it was weird because I was like I wonder what my parents are going to think if I suggest this. And it was interesting because my mom had taken my dad’s name. But she was a doctor. And she was like, you know what, we totally get this. If I look back at my career it might have been easier. And I asked my dad because it’s his last name. And he’s like, “Oh my god, do it.”

So, they were the only real obstacles. I was thinking of like, OK, well how is this going to make them feel. But I was so happy I did it.

**John:** Yeah. So I changed my last name, too.

**Mindy:** Did you really?

**John:** Yeah. My last name was German. It was Meise. It’s pronounced Mize-y. But no one ever could pronounce that name. So you’d see this hesitation and they’d go Meyes? Mise? And so the first ten seconds of meeting anybody was just correcting how they mispronounced–

**Mindy:** Correcting them.

**John:** How they mispronounced my name. And it’s a terrible way to start any new conversation. And so between graduating from school in Iowa and moving out to Los Angeles I took my dad’s middle name, which is August, as my last name and it just–

**Mindy:** That’s so funny. I didn’t know that.

**John:** Yeah. It makes life so much easier.

**Mindy:** Isn’t it? So it’s just a making life easier thing. Isn’t it so interesting?

**John:** But I mean I do also worry that this temptation to make things simpler for everybody also just makes things kind of whiter and smoother. I do worry that it takes some of the–

**Mindy:** No, for sure.

**John:** The texture out of the world.

**Mindy:** No, it’s true. And then also it’s just like are the only people who can be successful just have these incredibly easy to pronounce names? You know, it’s funny, I once saw this tweet that Kumail Nanjiani tweeted which is like “People have trouble saying my name. It’s just what it looks like.” And if I had a name that was just what it looked like, that’s how you pronounce it, I would have no issue. But I think you’re right.

But, you know, when you’re young you don’t think about the sort of sociopolitical ramifications of what you’re doing. You’re just like I got to make it. This is another obstacle getting in my way.

**John:** I think changing my name, you know, maybe is 5% of sort of making me more successful. But just that same thing where people don’t stumble across your name just helps.

**Mindy:** Or they’re inwardly wincing, you know, about trying to recommend me to something or bring me up in conversation, even when you’re not–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Mindy:** Like half of my life I’m like I love Chimamanda Ngozi. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing her name right. Because she’s such an amazing writer. But half the time I want to reference her I’m like, ah, I’m going to mess up her name and then I’m going to seem like I’m–

**John:** Yeah, or you say the poet who wrote the Beyoncé stuff. That’s the same person you’re talking about. So you might not directly use her name, but refer to her as the thing, or the other person’s name you can pronounce.

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a challenge.

**Mindy:** I know. Which is a different way of making yourself be invisible. I don’t have an opinion about recommending it to other people or not. But you made your decision when you were very young. I did it when I was 21.

**John:** I was 21, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And it’s like to the point where like it’s funny, you make those kinds of decisions when you’re just so ambitious and just so didn’t want there to be an obstacle. Because I’m like there’s already a million obstacles in my way. Why would I not move that? I don’t know if I would make that decision if I was older, but I did it.

**John:** I do have friends who have considered what last name to use and end up using their Latino last name deliberately so that they are on lists for staffing, so people can actually see that they are a Latino writer. Because if they have a generic white-sounding name they may not know that you’re a Latino writer. It’s a weird time.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** So, you have written Matt and Ben. It’s gone great. And did you also do it in Los Angeles? How did more people discover it?

**Mindy:** Yeah, so then what happened with the play was it had enough people – off the success of the Fringe then like little producers in New York who they can do Off-Broadway plays, they put up money for that, put it up at PS122.

**John:** Great.

**Mindy:** Which is a great venue in Downtown New York. And we got more and more people. And that was when – when it was PS122 that’s when like Steve Martin came to see it and Nicole Kidman came to see it. We got our photos taken with them afterwards. And it became like a hot ticket. And we would do it six or seven times a week. And then from that they’re like, you know what, this would probably do well in LA.

And so I was so excited to go to LA because I knew that my future as a comedy writer – at that point I knew I wanted to write for TV. I felt that it was in Los Angeles, not in New York. And so I was really excited to go out there. And we went out there – this is how – I’m actually amazed at myself sometimes, because I already had an Arrested Development spec I had written.

**John:** Amazing. So you watched the show and you just guessed on sort of what a script of that would look like? Or had you read a script?

**Mindy:** So I had gone to the 67th Street Upper West Side Barnes and Noble and they have books on how to break into TV writing. So I bought like two books and they all said you need a spec script of a show. And then because this is like pre scripts being available online, I actually went in SoHo there’s this guy who sells TV scripts, printed out copies of TV scripts, on like a foldout table on Broome Street.

**John:** I’ve seen that guy. So you actually–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was like Broome and Spring. He would set up his little – in a full circle moment I now like own an apartment in SoHo and I still see that same guy there selling his sitcoms and he has an episode of The Office that I wrote.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** I know. And I was like should I tell this guy? He’ll be like, “Fuck off, it’s not interesting to me. Who cares?” But I was like my full circle moment! You’re part of it, sir.

Yeah, so I got a copy of Arrested Development. And so I literally I was just like I don’t know about act breaks. I don’t know how long the script should be. I have a sense of it just from watching it on DVDs. So while we were doing Matt and Ben at night in New York, because I knew we were going to go to LA at that point. We had like two months before we were going to go. So I was like, OK, I have a couple of ideas for this. So I got an Arrested Development script ready to go.

So, I had that when we went to LA.

**John:** None of what you described so far sounds like luck. All of it sort of sounds like hard work.

**Mindy:** Thank you. You know, I’ve often – like you know, I think that hard work is two different things. Because like hard work is like, in America at least, it’s like good to be hard-working. But often it’s cool, particularly from some of my WASP-ier friends who maybe worked on the Lampoon where like you’re not supposed to show how ambitious you are. It’s just there’s such a bad look. And I’m like, well, if that’s true then I’m like living a perpetual bad look because I am like nothing without my panic fear, hard work like cycle that I go through.

But, yeah, thank you. I don’t think I had any luck either.

**John:** No.

**Mindy:** I mean, I definitely had supportive parents. And I went to a great school. So it’s not that – I had luck being born into a nice family who had enough money to send me to an Ivy League school for sure. But–

**John:** But to describe back a few things, you were talking about the panic and rather than just dwelling on the panic you actually started talking through stuff with a friend. You walked around. You recognized that this thing that you’re actually describing could actually be a good thing. You did the work to actually write that thing. And then the work to actually figure out a way that people could see this thing. And see that it was good. And while you’re having success, you didn’t take that, OK I’m going to stop here. You’re like I’m going to work extra hard to write the thing that will get me to the next place.

And so many people I think along the way they get to this thing and they’re like, “OK, when will lightning strike more? When are people going to notice me more?” And they’re not doing the thing to actually get them to the next place.

**Mindy:** Well it’s exhausting, right? Because that’s how you – just to keep going, it’s like you can never just sort of sit and be content for too long. It’s like constantly churning, especially as a writer, and particularly if you’re creating your own work it’s just a constant thing. But luckily I have enough panic for many lifetimes. So I think I’ll be OK.

**John:** So you come out to Los Angeles and you’re doing the play and you’re also meeting folks?

**Mindy:** So I’m doing the play. The play is going like spectacularly badly.

**John:** Was it at the Hudson? Where were you doing it?

**Mindy:** It was going so badly. It was at the Acme Theater on La Brea, which I think is still there. It’s going so spectacularly badly. Horrible. It’s like this is so not a theater town.

**John:** I remember reading a review of it in Variety which I think was a good review.

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** But I remember actually seeing the physical, because I had the printed Variety at that point, and I remember seeing–

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** The first time seeing a review of it.

**Mindy:** Oh my god. It was horrible. It was horrible, horrible, horrible. And there’s just something, in New York, because I like the play and I think it’s a funny play, and I think the performances are great. Not my performance. My friend. I just thought it was a good play. It was worthy of – I believed in it. Anyway.

And I think that in New York there’s just much more of a feeling of these little rinky-dink plays with something special in them. They have little venues. It’s like you can go on a date. Or you could do whatever. And it felt like here if you brought someone to go see a play in LA you were like “This is the worst date of my life. What are you, poor? Why can’t you take me to something nice?”

And so it just had a very different feeling about it here. So it went terribly and I, again, I was really panicked about that. But because of my spec script our agent, who started representing us when we went Off-Broadway, for writing was – I was taking meetings to staff on things. And actually that was going really badly, too.

**John:** And why badly? Because they would have already read you before you’d gone in. So, did you–?

**Mindy:** I can’t even, I just want to say, I can’t emphasize how much there was not this feeling of wouldn’t it be great to have writers in a writer’s room that don’t look like everybody else. It truly was like that wasn’t a thing at all back then. And I felt that it was – I had done this play. I had an Arrested Development spec. I really wanted to get into – I thought Will and Grace is such a great show. Couldn’t get a meeting on Will and Grace. Couldn’t get a meeting on – at that time it was Father of the Pride, was that animated show that was going to be after the Olympics. Couldn’t get into that room.

Couldn’t get a meeting with any of those people. But now if I think about it like an Indian-American girl who had like written a play that won the Fringe Festival who would come out to LA who had written a spec, like I’d be like of course I would take a meeting with that person. But things have just changed now, or maybe because I am Indian, where every showrunner would be like well of course you’d meet that person. It seems like what a great person to put on your show. But it wasn’t that.

Or maybe my material just wasn’t good enough. But the doors were just completely slammed shut except for Greg Daniels who had seen my play with his wife Susanne and they–

**John:** Susanne Daniels at that point was running the WB Network.

**Mindy:** WB. Yeah. Or, you know, I think she just left the WB and was now an independent producer. But so Greg and she had seen the show and Greg wanted to – Greg and I met for The Office, which wasn’t a thing yet, and when I had my meeting with him I hadn’t even seen the original Office. I hadn’t even heard of it.

And so met with me. We had a really long meeting, which I thought went terribly. And then after he hired me as a staff writer for six episodes first season. NBC so did not believe in this show at that time. But I didn’t – it was not a job that anyone who wanted to be a comedy writer would have signed up for. Because who would sign for six episodes when you could do a 22-episode fifth season of an existing show?

**John:** So a general rule, I think long meetings are good. Has that been your experience since that time? Are most long meetings good meetings?

**Mindy:** Yeah, you know, at the time I had no idea. It was maybe my second or third meeting that I’d had. Yeah, I think long meetings are good. You’re totally right. Long meetings are good.

Greg, if you have ever met him, is someone who is completely comfortable with like long pauses and silences. He’s a very reflective person who can be thinking about something and you’re just sitting there nervous. It wasn’t like a chatty fun, “Oh I know that person, too,” like one of those kinds of meetings. He is just a – he will not just be like chattering away if he doesn’t think it’s worth saying, whereas I’m the opposite. I’m as my mom calls me a talkie-talkie, say-nothing.

So I’m like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was not. But I remember leaving thinking like oh my god if I could work for that guy. He’s so fucking smart. And I was at the King of the Hill offices because he was I think working on The Office while he was doing King of the Hill. So, it was very intimidating.

**John:** And when you were hired on did you know that you were going to be a performer as well? Or were you just hired on to write?

**Mindy:** I didn’t – I just thought I was going to be a writer. I didn’t know that there was a clause in there which is as a performer there was a pre-negotiated thing. And I think my agent so thought that was not a possibility that we didn’t even talk about it.

And it didn’t occur to me that being on a sitcom that was only picked up for six episodes was something to worry about. Or that there was something better than that. I think that looking back it was of all my professional success being hired on The Office was probably the most exhilarating.

**John:** Yeah. Because suddenly you really are being paid to do the thing that you want to be doing.

**Mindy:** Really getting paid.

**John:** Drew Goddard was on the show and we were talking about some of those early jobs, some of the best early jobs are sort of the underdog jobs or sort of the long shots, or shows that are kind of in trouble, or no one is really paying attention, because then as the new person in you sort of can just do new stuff. And The Office was really, even though it was based on an existing format, was really breaking sort of new weird spaces.

**Mindy:** That’s such a good point. That’s such a good point. I think that Drew was correct. Drew Goddard is smart for a reason. He’s successful for a reason.

**John:** He’s a very smart person.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** Because he was talking about sort of early on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and when things were just in chaos that’s a really great time to come onboard because they’re open to sort of new ideas. And you’re there while they’re figuring stuff out.

**Mindy:** Did you see the documentary about the Dana Carvey show?

**John:** No. I haven’t.

**Mindy:** OK. So it’s a great, great documentary about how could this go wrong, because the writing staff I’m sure you know was like Colbert, Carell, Charlie Kaufman, Robert Carlock. It was just like, Dana. So it has huge – and of course Dana Carvey was the star at the height of his powers. And it had this hugely talented staff, of all white men, but it did terribly and it got canceled I think in its first season or only lasted one season.

And it was so fascinating because here’s like how did that not go well? And I think maybe because there was so much scrutiny on it. Where everyone was like we can’t wait to see – they’re rubbing their hands together – we can’t wait to see what Dana Carvey does. And it was, probably because there was just so much scrutiny.

The Office was the opposite of that, which was I think that – I don’t want to speak out of turn here, because Greg knows better than me. I was like a staff writer so I truly didn’t know what was going on that much. But my sense of it was that The Office was like, “OK, six episodes, like let’s just let this run its course.” And frankly our first season we did terribly. I still love those first season episodes. I think they’re so funny, but I also think I was particularly attached to them because it was my first experience writing in TV. It was just completely intoxicating and it was such a small room. And I was like, “Oh, Mike Schur is so cool and mean. And B.J. Novak is so cool and mean. And everyone is so cool and mean. I hope they become my friends.” And it felt like we were just doing like such – by the way, now they’re going to be like, “Why’d you say I was cool and mean on the podcast?”

I was going to say they’re both very nice, which is also not true, but they’re both perfectly nice and have since become my good friends. But I just remember being like I’d never been around this level of concentrated comedy, of people who just like knew what they were doing. And I was just trying to keep up.

**John:** So talk to me about know what you’re doing, because I’ve never written half-hour and I don’t really have a good sense of what the process is like in the room and I’m sure it’s different for certain shows than other shows. But as you guys are breaking an episode, so you have a general sense of the ideas of the episode or the big things that are happening. How many days are you there figuring out, OK, this is the episode before someone goes off and writes it? The Office or your later shows.

**Mindy:** The Office or later shows. Well, I just took the way that we had done things at The Office and brought that onto The Mindy Project. And I did it at Champions. And then now at Four Weddings and a Funeral. We just do things the same way.

And the way that we did it – the way that Greg did it – was that we would kind of blue sky or talk about the entire series for several weeks, maybe two weeks. And sort of like we would take a couple days and talk about each character and what made them funny. What was their wound? How would they react in different situations? Their backstory. And that’s when, those first couple weeks is when you figure out like, OK, Dwight Schrute has a beet farm. That kind of thing. Michael Scott, you know, he talks about his mother and his step-father but we never really know about his dad. I don’t know how far we got with it.

But we just – and then we just went through all the main characters on the show and did that.

**John:** And at this point had a pilot script been written? Or this was before the pilot script was written? Because it was kind of a special case on The Office right?

**Mindy:** Yeah, well no, Greg adapted the pilot. They had already shot the pilot, when I came onboard. So then when they’re hiring a staff that’s when like Mike, me, Paul Lieberstein, that we came onboard. And B.J. was in the pilot, but he was in the writer’s room as well.

So we had this small room. And so then after the second week of talking kind of blue sky about the characters then it was like, OK, we have these six episodes, let’s like go – one of them is already written, so we have five episodes. What would be great or funny things? And that was all like well above my pay grade. That was kind of Greg deciding what he wanted to do. And then us pitching jokes on how that could be funny, or twists and turns in the story.

**John:** So what’s happening in the room, are you pitching jokes like actual dialogue jokes? Or are you pitching conflicts or little bits of like this scene would work like this? How much to dialogue are you getting into in the room?

**Mindy:** In the room?

**John:** Before someone goes off and writes the script?

**Mindy:** I think at The Office the first season it would be, like if Greg or Paul Lieberstein who were like the co-EPs and EPs on the show, if they had like a turn of phrase or a piece of dialogue that they thought Michael could say, or Dwight would say, then that would go into the script. I mean, I don’t really know how many even usable bits of dialogue or jokes I even contributed. But not that much. In later shows, like what we did at The Mindy Project, which has a completely different rhythm. Because what happened at Mindy was – it was a couple Office writers, but not that many because they were all still working on The Office. Because my first season of Mindy was the last season of The Office. So those guys were still employed.

Actually, I don’t know if I had any Office writers my first season. I don’t think I did. I had a couple 30 Rock writers. A couple Simpsons writers. And then the other writers – I’m sorry, one Simpsons writer, and then everyone else was from late night TV, from like Jimmy Fallon and Colbert.

So, the style of that show was very different from The Office for a lot of reasons. It wasn’t a mockumentary. But the joke rhythm became a little bit more – The Office has tons of jokes, but it was more of a hybrid. It had a real like more 30 Rock/Simpsons joke dense type of show. And that became a show where there was a lot of dialogue in the outline, because I was in the room, and I was the lead. So it felt like, OK, if I said something and it made people laugh, or I liked it, it would just stay in the final script.

**John:** So, Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she has a similar situation like you have on Mindy Project where she’s in the room for breaking the stories and sort of figuring stuff out, but then she’s ultimately the star of the show and has to go off and be the star of the show. Something like Mindy Project, how did you split your time between “I am the showrunner” and “I’m also the star of the show?” How were you switching back and forth between those roles?

**Mindy:** It was incredibly time-consumptive, particularly when we were at Fox. It was just a real seven day a week job. So I would go to work, my call time would be like 5 or 5:30. We’d do that first season thing where on a show you do like 13 hour days.

**John:** And why the first season? What’s different?

**Mindy:** Because on the first season scripts are longer because you’re not sure what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. So you need to just shoot longer things. And you don’t know yet. The characters, you don’t know who they are yet. So things are a little bit overwritten. And by the end of Mindy we were doing I think 11 hour days, which was great. But at the beginning it was like 13 or 14 hour days. And then I would come and then once if there was a lighting setup at Universal our writer’s room was really just like across the way, so really close. There’s a lighting setup for 45 minutes, I would go to the writer’s room and check in, see what they were working on. And then I would go back over and just do that.

And then when I wrapped at night, 6 or 7, I would edit to about 10, then go home.

**John:** Brutal.

**Mindy:** So it was tough. And then on the weekends I would just go over my lines for the next week, but then also on Saturday probably go into post. So the thing that gets really kind of held back is post. Because they can’t cut an episode without me. The director will do a director’s cut, but they can’t really do that final pass without me there. So on Saturdays I’d be there for like four or five hours doing that.

But, it was a lot of time, but it was also like I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. It was my only goal in life was to have my own TV show. So, for me, it was like, eh, this is fun.

**John:** Your life is being inside the show.

**Mindy:** Yeah. My life is being on the show, so it was fine.

**John:** The one TV show that I did show run, I did find myself, like I would go through life and everything was just being sorted into two bins. Is that part of the show? Is that not part of the show? A song will play on the radio. Could that in the show? I felt like I was just constantly grabbing at things out in the real world and trying to put them in my little basket.

**Mindy:** It’s fun though isn’t it?

**John:** It is sort of fun. Anything that can happen out there you’re like, oh, this could be a thing. But I found myself, there was like a little red light that would come one. If we’re having this conversation it’s like, oh this kind of conversation could be in the show, which is – I’m not sure it was actually emotionally very healthy to do that.

**Mindy:** Oh interesting. You know, my character was so out there and it was all dating stories and I wasn’t dating at all, so I didn’t get a lot of that. But I would see would be like, “Oh, my assistant loves Workaholics.” I’m like, “Oh, that guy Anders Holm, they love him.” And like, “Oh, he should be a boyfriend on the show” and then he would be.

Or I would see Seth Rogan at an event and be like, “Oh, Seth should be on the show.” That’s fun to just find actors. And for a serial dating show it’s really fun to be like, oh, this guy is big on a Broadway play. And when you have a show, a TV show for theater people is actually like kind of fun and glamorous for them to come be on a TV show. Or Mark and Jay Duplass, I met them–

**John:** Oh my god, they’re great.

**Mindy:** They’re great. And they set a meeting with me because they wanted me to like either be in or – it was for me to be in a movie that they were going to produce. And nothing happened with the movie, but after meeting both of them I was like, oh, I want them to be on the show. And then they became the midwife brothers on the show. I only did this because Jay Duplass has said this many, many times that he credits me with kicking off his acting career, because he had never acted before then. And so that always fills me with pride.

**John:** They have such a weird Penn and Teller vibe as those characters. It was so disturbing.

**Mindy:** Penn and Teller vibe. That’s so funny. Yeah, that was – I always loved when those guys could come be on the show. They were so funny.

**John:** So, as you’re learning your lines over the weekend though, if there’s something you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t really working for me right,” could you just rewrite your lines?

**Mindy:** I could rewrite it. So in some ways it’s easy. It’s easier when the star of the show is also the showrunner, because it’s not one of these things where you’re like I hope, you cross your fingers and hope at the table read that the lead likes it/gets the joke. It made rewrites easier because for the most part I like knew what was going to happen. And so when we would rewrite things, we’d have to rewrite me a little bit, but it was mostly the other characters.

What became hard was that, at least when we were at Fox, it was like the notes we would get would be just – like that would keep us there for overnight Sundays/Saturdays. Because we would hear something and be like, “Oh, they don’t like this one character.” And you’re like, “OK, so we’ll write them off in a fun, believable way.” And they’re like, “No, they can’t be in the next episode.” So, you would say like you want us to get rid of that character without a sendoff? They’re like, yeah, they just – I don’t want to say the person I’m talking about, but they just don’t want to see them again.

And so we would get knocked a lot because there was a lot of characters that we were kind of – the edict was to just not see them again. And who would believe that the head of a network or development execs at a network would just say, “Yeah, they just can’t be in the next one. Our boss is going to freak out.” That that would actually be the case. So it just looks like, oh, Mindy didn’t like that person and wanted them off the show. And most of the time you’re like I hired this person. I would never want them to just to be off the show in this kind of way. It makes no sense.

**John:** So again, and we won’t talk about specific actors, but having watched I think almost every episode of your show, there were best friend characters or other friends. And so Mindy would have friends sometimes and not friends other times. And there was probably a focus question of like is this a work show or is this a Mindy’s home life show? Is that the kind of stuff that would come up?

**Mindy:** Well, you know, it was interesting. It was two things. If you look at 30 Rock or Parks and Rec, like Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope have no girlfriends accept for the people that they work with. And at the beginning of my show I was like, oh, it would be great if she had – I mean, I love Sex and the City. I would love for her to have girlfriends. But what ended up happening is we were at work so much, so you would end up having this thing of like how do we get the best friend at work.

For the record, I really loved having that – I liked that challenge. And we’ve always had great actors who would play my friends on the show. And then what would happen was that the network would say, “That stuff isn’t working. Cut it. We don’t want to see them.” But what it always felt like, and you have these fights where you’re like I don’t think people necessarily understand this when they watch a show. You have these fights of like I don’t want to do that. I want to write them a sendoff or I want to keep doing that. And it’s just like, “Do you want your show to continue on the air? No.” You have to like – and so you learn like, oh, things don’t work the way where you know it’s going to be better creatively.

And so I don’t know that other streaming platforms or cable networks don’t do that the same way, but I think there’s a reason why the comedies that most people are really enjoying are not on networks. Because I think that there’s these panicky edicts to get rid of things or change things up that make sometimes shows not work at the beginning.

So we were so lucky we came back after there was – I liked so much of the first season, but it was so rocky. Like some inconsistency, particularly the first 13 episodes where it was like this feels a little bit out of control. That kind of evened out in later seasons.

**John:** I don’t think this is true of your show, but there have been definitely shows I’ve seen the first season where it was clear they aired them out of order, or they just rejiggered the plan. Because a character is introduced in episode five but they actually showed up in episode three. It’s always so weird as the viewer to see–

**Mindy:** Well, they fall in love with an episode and they’re like, “Ooh, we want to air this now.” And I’m like a character has a broken arm in this episode that doesn’t have a broken arm in the previous one or something. It just doesn’t make any sense. And sometimes it’s coming from a good place. And it’s always a development exec who is just like, “We want to save the show. So we want to put the very best one next.” And you’re like “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

So, often it’s really coming from people who are, because there were so many big champions of our show at Fox. And a lot of times they’re like, “But we think this will help keep the show on the air and isn’t that the whole point?” So then you would do something, because yeah, I don’t want to have a six-episode show of a show that I really believed in that I didn’t make any compromises at all. And ultimately it was worth it that first – it was even just the first 13 episodes. Because at the end when we were in like Season 6 at Hulu they were like, hey, do you want to come back and do another season? And at that point I hadn’t realized like, oh, that’s such a rare thing, because I had gone from The Office to then Hulu, which was like you want to keep doing it?

And Craig Erwich is such a feeling of supporting it. It was like, yeah, you can do it as long as you wanted. And I was like, no. I was like, no, I want to go be in like A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean’s 8 and go do movies for a while. Being like, oh yeah, that will be done in like a year. But it is nice to see what other kind of characters I can play.

**John:** Can we talk about Champions, because I tweeted at you because I loved Champions so much.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. I loved it, too.

**John:** I was really impressed by the pilot because I’ve never written a half-hour pilot, but sort of the density of what a half-hour pilot has to do in terms of establishing the premise, the characters, the unique voices for the characters. I felt like every line in that pilot had to do like five jobs in terms of establishing these guys are brothers, they own this gym, their father died. He had a kid by this woman he hasn’t seen all this time. Now she’s dropping—

It was such a–

**Mindy:** It was so dense with plot and things.

**John:** It was like a full two-hour movie that had to be crammed into this little 30-minute thing, but it felt – everything was just nipped and tucked just so delightfully.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. That’s so nice.

**John:** So it was you and Charlie–

**Mindy:** Charlie Grandy.

**John:** And so what was the genesis of that pilot?

**Mindy:** I think with Charlie and I, because we had worked together for so long on so many different shows, I wanted to do – because I came to him with the idea. I think we both – we wanted to do something different than Mindy, but I wanted to do a young gay character. And I wanted to write for a guy. Because I’d been writing for Mindy for so long.

It’s crazy, because J.J. Totah who played the lead in that show–

**John:** He’s just remarkable.

**Mindy:** He’s so remarkable. But we didn’t know he existed before we wrote that part. So we wrote this really specific part of a half-Indian like very theatrical confident but with some vulnerabilities, this character, which is so specific. And then we found this young kid who played the part completely, but it was one of those things when we were auditioning we were like what the hell did we do? It’s not just a young teenage kid that’s a great actor, and singer, and dancer, which is already so hard to find. We’re like he has to be half-Indian, or look half-Indian. So that was incredible.

And writing for that voice was really fun because I love characters who want to come to New York and be strivers and are chatty and enter a room and they kind of like download their entire deal. And so he was like Mindy in some ways, but he had this vulnerability because he didn’t have a dad. So it was a really, really fun show to work on.

**John:** The other character I thought you had a great original voice for was the Andy Favreau character whose name I don’t remember. Dim-witted, but in a very different kind of dim-witted than I usually see in these shows. He was so good-natured and Canadian in sort of an odd way. And that brotherly dynamic is a thing we don’t–

**Mindy:** That’s funny. Matthew. Andy is so funny. And Matthew was just like, yeah, in some ways he could have seen just kind of stock, but he was smart about certain things and he was super moral. And also like really ambitious about the gym. And I remember he would always talk about like we thought it was really fun that he thought the most important familial relationship was between uncle and nephew. He’s like that’s the most valuable relationship. He didn’t really come alive until he discovered he had a nephew. That really fulfilled him. He was just a really sweet, funny character. And I mean Andy was so funny playing that part.

**John:** So writing with Charlie on this pilot, what is the process and what’s the give and take of figuring out like who wants what and sort of who is responsible for what?

**Mindy:** I love writing with another person. That was kind of the first time since I’d written Matt and Ben that I’d written with a writing partner. And what was great about writing with Charlie was I was shooting Ocean’s 8 at the time in New York and he was in LA. So we spent two or three months meeting, because Mindy was still happening. So we would meet on the weekend and then before work.

So we broke the story and carded it onto a board. And then what we did was – I think this is what we did. I took the blue cards and he took the red cards. And we just outlined it. We wrote what each scene would kind of be. I moved to New York. We’re in the middle of our outline. We had our respective assistants. Mine was in New York and his was in LA. Like Frankenstein them together, the cards. And then we had this kind of rough document that didn’t – it made sense, but it was tonally all totally different and all over the place. And you got to see like, oh, he really like sparked to this aspect of this guy’s character and I sparked to this. And you learn a lot. And it’s so much fun.

And then what we did was we massaged the document tonally into one thing. He would do a pass on it, and then I would do a pass on his pass. And so we had this outline which we then submitted–

**John:** How many pages long was this kind of outline?

**Mindy:** So, towards the end of Mindy we started doing really long outlines that were really detailed because it took the edge off of that horrible feeling you have of a blank page when you’re writing a script. So our outlines were often like 27 pages long.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Mindy:** And a script is like 32 pages.

**John:** So suggesting the dialogue but not really having blocked out?

**Mindy:** Sometimes we would write the dialogue to begin with. But it was like a Microsoft Word document. And then what’s great is then we would just when you put the Microsoft Word outline that has dialogue but just like in block form and you put that into a Final Draft document you’re like, “This script is like written.” It’s like 31 pages already.

And then that to me always makes me feel better. And the great thing about breaking everything together to that level of detail is that when you’re looking over it with your writing partner you’re like, “Oh, I kind of think that they shouldn’t make this decision and this beat should be two beats later.” So that when you’re actually writing the script it’s kind of really fun. Because you’re fleshing out the thing that’s already been really, really established. You can’t mess up. You can just make it better.

That’s something that we kind of figured out at The Mindy Project which is why when we were at Hulu it just made everything so efficient and no writer came in with a draft that was like bad because we had done so much room work on the actual outline.

**John:** Cool. Now, you’re in the room right now. What are you working on?

**Mindy:** I’m working on a miniseries, a ten-episode miniseries that’s an adaptation of the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

**John:** Holy cow. That feels exactly in your wheelhouse.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, Richard Curtis is such a genius and has such a distinct voice. And it wasn’t until I was adapting someone else’s distinct voice that I was like, “Oh, I think I have a distinct voice and it’s not the same as this person’s voice.” So it’s been interesting being like, well, people are really – if they wanted to watch Four Weddings and a Funeral as an adaptation into a miniseries what would that look like? And what did they want knowing that I’m doing it?

So I’m trying to fulfill the promise of people who want to see that while also being like, OK, this is through the eyes of Mindy Kaling. And the biggest change that we made is the lead is an African American girl. And the male lead is a British Pakistani man. And so already I’m like, OK, I feel like I can get onboard with these two leads.

**John:** And so right now are you just blue-skying, or you’re breaking episodes? What happens in this part of the room?

**Mindy:** We just finished blue-skying which is the most fun period of preproduction and now we’re going into breaking the first episode. I mean, the first episode is actually written, so we’re doing episode two, which is a little bit harder. Less fun.

**John:** So a listener wrote in with a question which I thought would be a perfect question for you. So we’ll try to answer this question. Iris in Philadelphia writes, “I’ve been developing my first feature film and I’m putting a lot of thought into point of view. The film is an unconventional romance. The majority of the film is through the point of view of the protagonist. How do I shift the POV at one key point in the film? Do you find that certain genres lend themselves to using POV in different ways?”

So POV is a crucial thing for the things you’ve written. The Office of course has that documentary conceit. Four Weddings and a Funeral, at what point are you approaching POV in figuring out your stories? And who can drive a scene by themselves?

**Mindy:** Wow. I can talk about it more from TV than features because I’ve only written like two features. But I will say that in TV it’s kind of trial and error. You see like, OK, we know – at least in The Mindy Project we’re like we know Danny can do a POV story. We know Mindy can. Adam Pally seems to be able to be and that character.

And then sometimes you’ll do a character on the show and it’s somehow not working. And it’s often because as a POV character we didn’t take the time at the beginning. You have to establish who are the leads and who are the secondary characters. And it’s a real thing. And when you have a secondary character they only reveal themselves as a secondary character when they try to have a story. And it just is not as interesting.

And I think that we did that on The Office, too. It’s like there were five characters who could hold a story. And if you tried to do that with someone else–

**John:** A Phyllis story wouldn’t make a lot of sense in The Office.

**Mindy:** It wouldn’t. And she would have things, like Phyllis’s wedding was the name of a story. She would often be like the cover story of an episode, but it really revealed itself. And that’s something you do at the very beginning. You have to decide, particularly in a comedy, that you’re not burn your characters off for jokes and make it so that you wouldn’t be able – that they’re not a fully three-dimensional POV character. It’s actually something that on Four Weddings we really want there to be – it’s an hour-long, so more than ever you really need these strong POV characters. You can’t have funny secondary characters where you make up some crazy backstory for them for a joke and you sacrifice something that’s their character just to do a comedy bit.

And so on Four Weddings we’ve been like, OK, this is an hour-long, so more than two characters have to be able to have story. So, it’s like eight characters have to be fully three-dimensional characters. And I think film is great that way. There’s a believability thing that movies have to have that sitcoms don’t have to have, I think, where it’s like, no, we demand all the characters be fully three-dimensionalized characters with active internal lives that you don’t necessarily have to have on a sitcom.

**John:** Well, the other difference between a TV series and a feature is that a feature generally you’re following a character on a journey they would only take once. And like that character is going to change over the course of this movie. But on a TV series you have to be able to come back to these characters again and again. So what you’re saying about not burning off a character for a joke, because you’re going to need them for like the next ten episodes, or even in a short-run like this you’re going to need them for later on. And you’ve got to make sure that it actually tracks and feels real.

**Mindy:** Well, it’s interesting because if you have like the character I played on The Office, Kelly, you only need her for like a joke or two an episode. So it’s OK that she has like insane backstory or big dramatic characteristics/personality traits and things, but you couldn’t do that for almost anyone else otherwise it would just be like only Steve Carell being able to do anything and you actually care.

So, that’s something I feel like I learned on The Mindy Project where I was like, oh, things are going to get really fucking exhausting for me if we don’t flesh out some of these other characters and so you really care about them and their journeys.

I don’t think this answered her question. Sorry Iris.

**John:** I think it did. This was good. We did a whole episode on POV and this was sort of a follow up question on that. But I think we couldn’t talk about it in TV the way that you could talk about it in TV, so thank you for that.

**Mindy:** Of course.

**John:** At the end of our shows we do a One Cool Thing. I think I emailed you to warn you about this.

**Mindy:** Yes. Yeah.

**John:** So do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Mindy:** Oh yeah. My One Cool Thing is a show on Netflix that I just started watching called The End of the Fucking World.

**John:** I heard it’s great. I want to watch it.

**Mindy:** It’s so good. Well, what it does is that it’s incredibly stylish. It’s very dark. And it does something at the very beginning – this isn’t a spoiler – where the lead character kills a cat because he’s a psychopath. And you’re like, whoa, according to books that I’ve read about screenwriting and writing you’re supposed to save the cat. So, I thought that was really bold and it’s just incredibly stylish. It’s really well directed, which I never used to care about how things were directed or think about it.

And then the other thing I’ve watched which I love is the miniseries Godless, which I really want women to watch because I think they see western – I don’t know, did you see Godless?

**John:** I did. Scott Frank was a guest on the show and it’s remarkable.

**Mindy:** It’s so great. And I think when you see western I think a lot of women are like, eh, that’s not something I’m all that interested in watching. But two of the great characters in it are women in roles that I think are just awesome that I have never seen in any movie. So I just loved that miniseries. And it don’t think there’s going to be a season two. It doesn’t seem like it’s that kind of thing. Did he tell you?

**John:** I haven’t heard about a season two.

**Mindy:** But I just loved it. Merritt Weaver’s role is so great. And Michelle Dockery is fantastic in it. So those are my two. What’s your thing?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is we went down to the Broad this last week, so the museum in Downtown Los Angeles. And it’s all remarkable. But this room we went in at the very end, and I typically don’t go into those video installation rooms because I didn’t come to a museum to see video, but it’s this amazing thing done called The Visitors. And it’s this installation by Ragnar Kjartansson – I’m butchering his name – but it is a bunch of Icelandic folks who went to this house in Upstate New York and they hung out at this old decrepit farmhouse. And they start singing this song. And the song goes on for like an hour. But they’re all in different rooms. They all have headphones on and their singing in their microphones. And the song just sort of keeps repeating.

But you’re seeing it on all these different screens around the room, so as you wander around you get close to somebody. You can hear them sing their song or play whatever instrument they’re singing. And eventually they all kind of come together and leave. And it was just beautiful. It was like kind of being inside the space of once in a way. It was just really remarkable.

So, if you’re downtown for any reason I would recommend go to the Broad, but also check out this really remarkable film installation thing called The Visitors. I think it’s there through January.

**Mindy:** That’s so great. Because when you said The Visitors I was like, ah, this is some slasher thing. I always go to horror movies. So that’s the opposite of a horror movie. That sounds great.

**John:** But I have this aspiration of just like hanging out with a group of sort of like grungy people and like singing songs in a farmhouse. And then you get to sort of be with that group of people and it’s remarkable. So, check it out.

**Mindy:** Cool.

**John:** And that’s our show. So our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the one we answered today.

For short questions, Twitter is great. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mindy, what are you on Twitter?

**Mindy:** I’m @mindykaling.

**John:** You’re also @mindykaling on Instagram? Correct?

**Mindy:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts and starting today on Spotify. So, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

Transcripts for the show go up about four days after the episode airs. You can find them at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the show notes for things we talked about on the show.

But most importantly I want to thank Mindy Kaling. It was so great to finally meet you and talk with you about writing stuff.

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was so good to be here. It’s funny, when you talk about your childhood or like your teen hood and how you became a writer, I was like I don’t want to revisit that. But I was glad I did.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fun. So, Mindy, thanks so much.

**Mindy:** Thanks.

Links:

* Thanks to [Mindy Kaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindy_Kaling) for joining us!
* [Champions](https://www.nbc.com/champions) is available to watch on NBC.com.
* You can watch a recording of her play, [Matt and Ben](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbMv3gO0lo), written and performed by Mindy and Brenda Withers. It premiered at the [Fringe Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_International_Fringe_Festival) in New York.
* Keep an eye out for [Four Weddings and a Funeral](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mindy-kalings-four-weddings-a-funeral-anthology-a-go-at-hulu-1106794).
* [The End of the Fucking World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_F***ing_World) and [Godless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(TV_series)) on Netflix
* [The Visitors](https://www.thebroad.org/art/ragnar-kjartansson/the-visitors) by Ragnar Kjartansson at The Broad
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Mindy Kaling](https://twitter.com/mindykaling) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_362.mp3).